In reply to Kevin Bonham.

Well you might argue that ethical standards actually arise from the interaction of research communities with other communities (both research and non-research) but that's probably an aside. The reality is that researchers are very bad at enforcing our own standards. Shifting this to journals/publishers/societies is one way to manage it. Not the only one of course but a way.

But this is not even so much about ethical standards as about catching mistakes and embarrassments before they become (too) public. That's a service. Now we could do it ourselves, but we mostly don't – some of this gets caught in peer review but a lot more in "technical review" – so the question is whether the service is good value for money and whether we need it.