An Editorial and Commentary in the 19 June issue of Nature (Nature 453, 957; 2008 and Nature 453, 980–982; 2008) are hotly debated at Nature Network’s News and Opinion forum. In the Commentary, Sandra Titus, director of intramural research at the US Office of Research Integrity, and her colleagues report a survey indicating as many as a thousand unreported instances of misconduct a year.
Could better policies stem this seeming flood? Lynn Howard Ehrle of the Organic Consumers Association writes of the “Faustian pact” in which many university presidents and deans have “accepted posts on corporate boards of directors where they have a primary legal fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders that is in conflict with the mission of the university, their students and patients”.
Other forum participants provide heartfelt personal evidence to support the Nature Editorial’s view that “misconduct investigations all too often focus solely on an individual offender, and fail to diagnose the environment that has allowed the misconduct to flourish”.
Nature 454, xi; 3 July 2008
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From the blogosphere by Maxine Clarke
An archive of the "From the Blogosphere" column on the Authors page in Nature, highlighting nature.com blog posts of interest to scientists in their role as authors and peer-reviewers. We welcome comments and suggestions.
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Misconduct survey stirs the pot -- 3 July 2008
- Date:
- Thursday, 03 Jul y 2008 - 19:29 UTC
Last updated: Thursday, 03 Jul 2008 - 19:29 UTC
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Comments
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What about “misconduct” by non-scientists, such as politicians and lawyers?
Is there any attempt to acquire data on that?
Interesting question, David! I hope so.
Good question, David. I am afraid too it’s a sociological effect swapping over into science. Too high competition, people who don’t know what ethics are good for or why they should follow them, so they try. Leads to an erosion of trust. Very bad development.
Yes, Sabine, all this and the pervasive “spin”, from the media and from the politicians themselves (the exponential growth of “special advisors” in recent years) confounds the parameters even more.
Not so sure about lawyers, though, that is a broad church and I believe that several disciplines of law have highly developed ethical guidelines, at any rate, though not sure about how actively they report/study it. But I stray outside my area of knowledge on these subjects.
Maxine, the characteristic unwillingness of scientists to “stray outside [their] area of knowledge” is part of the problem. Does a lack of knowledge inhibit politicians from straying outside their area of knowledge? Of course not.
If we consider that campaign speeches are in effect “proposals” that voters are to evaluate and so “award” a “grant” of authority, shouldn’t politicians be held to some standard of truth in their “proposals”?
The “environment that has allowed the misconduct to flourish” includes the society that scientists live in. When politicians lie about basic and fundamental aspects of human rights such as is torture permissible, is torture tolerated, is torture practiced, and are prisoners tortured to death, the “misconduct” of fudging a data point seems pretty trivial.
The prosecution of Dr. Steve Kurtz and Dr. Robert Ferrell for bioterrorism and mail fraud is an example of an egregious abuse of power; I see it as egregious prosecutorial misconduct. There was no legal or plausible or serious basis for these charges. It was a pure abuse of power for no reason other than to injure and damage the parties involved.
Why is there no investigation of this misconduct? We know why, because there is an “environment that has allowed the misconduct to flourish”.
I understand what you are driving at, David. By my “straying outside” comment I meant that I literally do not know whether these professions have misconduct procedures, or whether they perform surveys along the lines of the Nature Commentary authors.
Another recent legal case for your list is the recent attempt by a Pharma company (Merck or Pfizer?) to make a journal reveal the names of its peer-reviewers.
In these cases, the option to society is to change or clarify the laws. What of “hidden” misconduct?
I think that becuase one type of misconduct is less egregious than another, while true, is not a reason to ignore the lesser case. I don’t see it as an either-or situation.
Maxine, you are correct, but the point of many of the comments at the other blog was that who is doing the misconduct makes all the difference. That is true in science, it is true in politics. It is unfortunate.
Bill Clinton was impeached because he lied about sexual activity between consenting adults. George Bush has authorized and then lied about flagrant and grotesque human rights abuses where people have been tortured and died from the injuries they sustained while being tortured. George Bush misrepresented the “research data” that was the justification for going to war against Iraq.
I appreciate this has next to nothing to do with research integrity, but any type of enforcement system cannot be stable and successful if there are double standards. The standard has to be the same for the lowest technician, as for the most senior Nobel Prize winner.
We cannot force individuals to behave with integrity; we can force institutions to maintain an environment where high standards of integrity are enforced. That enforcement can only come from within. There can be outside pressure, but that outside pressure will work only if it motivates the insiders to do the right thing.
In trying to think of how such a system could be enforced, all I can come up with is a “thermonuclear option.” If an institution does not maintain an environment where high standards of integrity are enforced, then journals that require high standards of integrity might refuse to publish all articles from all researchers working at that institution, and explicitly explain why they are doing so. How long would it take a department or university or even the NIH to implement and enforce high standards if no one could publish anything until they did? I think that would focus the minds of all the researchers in a way that nothing else could. Enforcing those standards and demonstrating without a doubt that those standards are enforced would immediately become the highest priority of every researcher expecting to publish something. Is it “fair”? No, it isn’t, but neither is it “fair” to allow lax or uneven enforcement of standards of integrity. Members of an institution have an obligation to maintain the environment of that institution in the appropriate manner. They have an obligation to the journal they want to publish in to ensure that the integrity of the institution they are associated with is sufficient. Journals could require that the integrity obligations and regulations pertain to all members of the institution, including political appointees.
If an institution can not maintain high standards of integrity at every level, then its researchers would leave and go elsewhere, as they should.
As I remember the pharma legal case wasn’t just about revealing the names of peer reviewers, it was about providing them with unpublished manuscripts.
The Nature journals have considered “banning” an author who had been demonstrated to have acted badly, but we have not yet done so. Personally I feel uncomfortable with this approach as there is usually more than one author on a paper so a journal is also banning innocent (future) collaborators, etc.
I think if a scientist has been shown to have acted unethcially, the funder and/or institution can withdraw support – I think this is an appropriate course from the point of view of future work.
The online correction is extremely effective for papers reporting results that come into question. The Internet allows journal corrections and retractions to be visible to anyone who accesses the original paper. A journal-imposed retraction for misconduct reasons is appropriate, because it specifically targets the erroneous paper, and makes it transparent to readers (most of whom are accessing the paper via the web, eg via a database or indexing service, or at the journal’s website, after it has been published).