Among the highlights of the November 2015 issue of European Science Editing (ESE) is an essay on whether interpretation of research ethics is universal. Writing from an Iranian perspective, Behrooz Astaneh describes how cultural norms and inadequate financial means are used by some to justify practices that we in the West would consider unethical, such as guest authorship and the fiddling of results.1 He also speculates that the burden of international sanctions might encourage Iranian researchers to rationalise unethical behaviour as ethical.