ECEIA25, Day 4

 Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3 - Day 4

Last day of the conference!
First up is Sonja Ochsenfeld-Repp from the German funding organization DFG on "The role of funders in fostering academic and research integrity as part of research culture"

She first presents the DFG "Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice" (https://zenodo.org/records/14281892) [It is nice to have this code, but I doubt that many researchers in Germany are familiar with the code].

The DFG now has a research integrity portal: https://wissenschaftliche-integritaet.de/en/
From September 2022 they have a new mandatory CV template that only permit applicants to include a maximum of 10 papers each in Category A (peer-reviewed) and optionally 10 more in Category B (everything else).

They looked at three random samples of these CVs as well as written reviews and an online survey of researchers. For example 55% of researchers used the optional field Category B as well as information about parental leave, being first-generation academics, etc. In 20% of the written reviews, there was explicit mention of information from the optional fields, especially when mentioning recent everts.

Next up: Anna Michalska from the Business School of the University of Warwick on "Celebrating Academic Integrity".

She wants to get away from the punishment mindset and focus on celebrating integrity. They now have academic integrity leads in every department. They organize an "Academic Integrity Celebration Week". In the academic year 23/24 they discussed Artificial Intelligence in panel discussions, interactive workshops, stands, a web site and a competition with students.

The students were very creative, making poems, recipes, posters, etc.

In February 2025 they decided to have an Academic Integrity Month under the topic "Academic Integrity: A Skill for Life", focusing on professional integrity.

They again had workshops, comptetions, stands, student information stands, and set up a "Warwick Award" that students could obtain by fufilling tasks in 12 different core skill areas.

They are currently working on setting up a *paid* role for students as "Academic Integrity Champions".

The web site: https://warwick.ac.uk/students/learning-experience/academic_integrity/about/

The last talk in this session is from Anna Abalkina (FU Berlin, Germany) and Lonnie Besançon (Linköping University, Sweden) on academic sleuthing and the early career researchers who discover misconduct and are at risk.

One problem is the massive growth in published paper mill papers - they make up about 3% of all publications in medicine and biology, about 400,000.

Retraction Watch has only noted 56,000 retractions. This means that there are still around 350,000 papers out there that need to be retracted.

Who is responsible for post-publication correction? Peer review is not intended to detect fraud, universities have a conflict of interest, many editors-in-chief are unaware of the problem.

Anna published a recent article in Nature on stamping out paper mills: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00212-1

Lonnie published "Open science saves lives: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34090351/ in 2021.

Many sleuths get death threats, even!

There is a web site on how to do sleuthing: https://osf.io/2kdez/wiki/home/

I am chairing the next session, so just the list of talks here:

1) "A pilot study on preservice teachers’ use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in learning and practice" presented by Lydia Scholle-Cotton and Michael Holden from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

2) "Student perceptions of GenAI use in the UAE" presented by Zeenath Khan from the University of Wallongong in Dubai, UAE.

3) "Addressing the Ethical Divide: Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Responsibility in Higher Education" by Yovav Eshet from Zefat Academic College, Israel

So, after lunch the session I am attending starts with Clare Johnson speaking about "Detecting Academic Misconduct - Metadata Analysis as part of a Defense in Depth Approach".

In cybersecurity, one looks for indicators of compromise. Academic misconduct may display various indicators of compromise. One can use learner analytics, virtual learning environments, text matching software, stylistic and linguistic analysis. In essence teachers are applying digital forensic techniques to submitted assignments.

Microsoft Word format is not just a text document, but it rather takes a "movie" of how the document was produced. For her PhD she made a tool to give a forensic look to such documents (https://clarifyai.co.uk/). She can illustrate the editing order and various other metadata points.

The tool will apparently work with other editors that store in .docx format, but not with Google Drive documents.

Next up: Nancy Turner and Susan Bens from the University of Saskatchewan with "Enabling ethical standards through policy development in Canada: An academic integrity and artificial intelligence case study".

Canada does not have a national-level authority governing the universities, but at provincial level. Programs at university are accredited by accreditation boards. There is much power at a program level to make policy decisions.

It is not useful for a few people to just make up a policy and have teachers vote on it - they need to be involved in the decision process, students, too!

Students have been very active in creating their new AI use policy - they also were active in pointing out contract cheating during the Corona pandemic.

They get more buy-in because people throughout the university are involved in the process from the beginning.

Last talk for this session:

Kadri Simm from the University of Tartu, Estonia, Centre for Ethics on "The ethics of ethics surveys and implications for policy"

Ethics surveys have the risk of re-identifying the individual in small communities. So it can be better to just not ask. Even open comments can be problematic, as there are still here risks of identifiability. And because they didn't want to see the headlines on men or women being better/worse, they left this off.

They conducted a survery on ethics among Estonian researchers, omitting much of this identifiable information:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161241239791

It is important for such sensitive topics to design the surveys to proactively reduch potential harm to the participants. 

he conference is winding down with a final panel discussion on "Equity and diversity as an ethical challenge". Panelists are:

• Beatriz Moya
• Paulo Peixoto and the IRAFPA group via Zoom
• Shiva Sivasubramaniam
• Giga Khositashvili

Sarah Elaine Eaton is moderating. It is the closing panel for the #ECEIA25 and the opening one for the French IRAPFA (https://irafpa.org/)

That's all, folks, for the #ECEIA25 conference, I'll be back to normal (re-)tooting soon.

The next conference will be held in Batumi, Georgia at the Ilia State University in September 2026