The issue focused on the extent to which university officials could go to challenge peer reviews of articles before they are published in academic journals.


The regulator was seeking to use this information to discover whether academic institutions have complied with Article 10 of the German Academic Journals and Information Technology Law, which requires such measures to be in place by 2015.


An academic ethics committee agreed with the view that there was a need to go beyond the required study to examine whether universities would be breaching their legal duty to implement Article