WCRI 2019 - Day 2

Day 0 - Day 1a - Day 1b - Day 2 - Day 3

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I was sooo tired, that I slept in and missed the first session. Sorry about that.
I wanted to see talks in two sessions, natch, so I had to do a session hopping.

Session: Retractions Lydia Liesegang, a sociologist with the TU Berlin, Germany, spoke on "The impact of published incorrect scientific information on the knowledge production of scientific communities."

The talk was not actually about retractions, but about incorrect information.  She assumed that when people cite a publication, that they are using it to support an argument. That may be the general case, but I have cited things that are used as examples of bad science, and I am not alone, so I don't buy into this argument. She did a citation analysis of 30 problematic papers, finding 126 citing papers. The problematic papers were among those found by

Byrne, J.A. and Labbé, C. (2017) Striking similarities between publications from China describing single gene knockdown experiments on human cancer cell lines, Scientometrics 110(3): 1471-1493

(which is a fascinating reading in and of itself). 

There was some citation and propagation, but in conclusion she found that usually, incorrect information dies in the periphery. But such papers lead on the scientific community about possible rewarding research areas, so this could steer future research in the wrong direction and thus allocates resources to exhausted research areas.

I then switched to the

Session: Whistleblowers

The room was packed, I stood at the back with a number of people until the speaker switch happened and then squeezed myself into an empty space, climbing over many people.

"The 'Murky Waters' of questionable research practices" was presented by Johannes Hjellbrekke of the University of Bergen in Norway.  He conducted a survey for the Research Integrity in Norway (RINO) on  Fabrication, Falsification, and Plagiarism (FFP) and Questionable Research Practices (QRP) that was distributed to 31 206 researchers at Norwegian universities.

They did find self-reported FFP and QRP and used a lot of statistics in the hopes of identifying a specific group that needs to have a whistle blown.  They defined three groups of researchers: The Ethical (82 %), The Generous (oops, we made a boo-boo, for example using gift authorship, not informing about limitations of a study, not whistleblowing on colleagues, 13 %) and The Murky (5 %). The Murky are the group at risk.

Overrepresented in the "Murky" waters were: Private research institutes, social science, postdocs, Researcher II [no idea what this is], Senior Researchers, 30-39 years age.

Underrepresented in the "Murky" group were: Humanities, PhD candidates, Associate Professors, 60-69 years of age.

He closed with an interesting statistical observation, based on the work of Abraham Wald (1943): Don't strengthen war airplanes that have been shot at where there are hits. Instead, strengthen where there are no hits, because we are looking at the ones that returned, not the ones that were shot down.

Fascinating was the next talk, by lawyer  John R. Thomas, Jr., Healy Hafemann Magee, Roanoke and his brother, biologist Joseph M. Thomas, "Perspective of the whistleblower." Joseph Thomas was the whistleblower in the case of US ex rel. Thomas v. Duke University, et al. in which the US Department of Justice sued Duke University and won $112.5 million in damages.

John Thomas sued under a quirky US American law called the False Claims Act or "Lincoln Law."  If you defraud the government, they can sue you. It is traditionally used in contracting law, and now more often in Medicare and Medicaid cases. In this case it was for research misconduct that occured while working on grants from the federal government. Qui Tam provisions allow private whistleblowers to bring suit on behalf of the US Government.  The suit is first sealed while the government investigates. If the government finds that the case has merit, they take over the suit. If they win, they recover triple damages and the whistleblower may recieve up to 30 % of the recovered amount.
More on the case in Science and the press release of the Justice Department.

During the discussion someone from Duke asked if this wasn't a bit too harsh, as such a ruling could bankrupt smaller universities. John Thomas answered that that is the point of the provision: the courts know that a lot of fraud goes on, so if one gets caught, they are severely punished in order to make the others decide to clean up their acts.

The session closed with epidemiologist Gerben Ter Riet, Amsterdam University Medical Center & Univ. Applied Sciences, Amsterdam speaking about his "Reflections of a passionate and almost excommunicated scientist."

He was doing his normal duties and teaching a course on the responsible conduct of research (RCR) as well as mentoring students. He became active in the RCR area and published a few papers (1 - 2), but was told by a new boss that he was not bringing in enough grants, so he should terminate his RCR activity and focus more on science.

He even managed to obtain a grant for research integrity in 2017, but that was when things exploded in his lab.  He tried to get help inside the system, but was stonewalled at every turn. He noted when reading the document that came out 5 weeks ago in the Netherlands that, except for the sexual harassment, it rather fit his case.

Harassment in Dutch Academia, Exploring manifestations, facilitating factors, effects and solutions.

Two of his colleagues have left academia, he has a nominal position at the university hospital with some doctoral students and is now teaching at a local college.

Plenary session: Perspectives for funding agencies in shaping responsible research practices  

Anne-Marie Coriat, Head of Research Management, Wellcome Trust, London, spoke about "Towards a more positive culture for Trust in research – a systems perspective." She introduced the Wellcome Trust and identified that there is a systemic problem in science.  She closed with the statement that change will not happen if we act alone.

Kylie Emery, from the Australian Research Council, Canberra, had "Simplifying and strengthening responsible research practice – the Australian experience as her title and showed the slides of the Australian research landscape, their framework, the focus on shared responsibility, the role of funders for the THIRD time. 

Qikun Xue, Vice President Tsinghua University, Beijing was supposed to speak, but he had to cancel at the last minute, so he sent a colleague who had the job of presenting a Powerpoint Karaoke on "Research integrity practice at Tsinghua University: Policies and Practice". 

Tsinghua University is a very large Chinese university with over 14 000 faculty and staff and over 36 000 students. There were the usual ideas for dealing with the topic: education and sanctioning. A few Chinese scandals from the university were mentioned:

• 2005: Faculty member Liu from the Medical School fabricated research and was dismissed
• 2009: Plagiarism in a postdoc's published papers was found and he was punished
• 2014: A final project report by another faculty member Liu in the Dept. Of Mechanical Engieering turned out to be identical to the proposal, no acutal research was conducted, he was sanctioned.
• 2017: Papers published by a graduated PhD student were self-plagiarizing, re-using images and fabricating experimental results. The PhD was revoked.

During the discussion the question was asked, it being the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, what the current state of academic freedom at the university is. The speaker appeared a bit flustered, but assured us that people at university are allowed to have different opinions.

I was frozen cold on account of the air conditioning being set so low, so I got some hot tea before I came back to the last lecture of the day.

Mark McMillan, Dept. Vice Chancellor for indigenous people and Aboriginal law at RMIT University, Melbourne, and a Wiradjuri man from Trangie, NSW, spoke about deep time (120 000 years ago) and Aboriginal ways of knowing in "Ethical and integrity dilemmas for engaging with humanity's oldest living knowledge system." I have no earthly idea what he was on about.

We then gathered for a boat ride to the conference dinner. I was happy to spend the time chatting with Tracey Bretag. We froze on the bus, then got out at the water and melted in the heat and rain for about an hour. It was decided that we couldn't get on the boat there, as the water was too choppy, so they had to re-order the busses to take us to another pier, where we were able to get on. The weather cleared up and we had a wonderful trip out to the old city airport that is now a cruise liner terminal. It has a restaurant that does not mind serving 1000 people at once. We were only 700, so that sounded good.

It was bit odd that the vegetarians were expected to sit together. Half of us did, the others stubbornly stayed seated with their meat-eating friends and significant others. We were looking forward to the eight-course meal that started off with white Chinese yams. Not to become my favorite, but okay, seven more to come.

Except that the next five dishes seemed to be more or less the same: mushrooms with something gooey, drowned in brown sauce and with the odd other vegetable stuck in. The "vegetarian shark fin soup" was so strange tasting, one vegetarian said it tasted like beef stock had been used as a basis, so the Indians rather went on strike. Then we each got a small bowl of rice with  few cucumbers sliced in, no sauce. For dessert there were two small squares of Jell-o. At least the wine was good.... As we left we saw piles and piles of noodles and rice on the other tables - that and a bit of sweet-and-sour sauce would have been wonderful!

We had a nice ride back, although Tracey and I rather got into an argument with an administrator from Canada who insisted that their university would punish students who reused more than four words in sequence without a reference. She wanted to know what software she should use to teach the students. I got ticked off about the text-matching software, as is not useful for that purpose, and Tracey insisted that the policy is crocked (it is!) and should be changed. We still have a lot of educating to do!

More to come on the last day of the conference!

WCRI 2019 - Day 1b

Day 0 - Day 1a - Day 1b - Day 2 - Day 3

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Quite refreshed from a long night's sleep and reluctant to venture out into the rain, here's the rest of Day 1 of the WCRI conference 2019!

Session: Principles and Codes 2

Daniel Barr, RMIT University, Melbourne
"Research integrity around the Pacific rim: developing the APEC guiding principles for research integrity"

They looked at integrity systems across the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) area and collated a close consensus of guidelines:

• Research integrity systems appear diverse, multi-faceted and dynamic
• Principlies-based policies appear common, but are not uniform
• Limited coordination of institutions with some exceptions
• Varied roles in leading or influencing research integrity systems

They did a survey with 499 responses, but 85 % of the respondents were from Mexico, so they had to split their analysis on Mexico and not-Mexico. They also conducted a workshop with various participants. In honor of the memory of Paul Taylor they have developed the Draft APEC Taylor Guiding Principles for Research Integrity that are a top priority for avoiding breaches.

Honesty, Responsibility, Rigour, Transparency, Respect, Fairness, & Diversity

The topic of Diversity was a principle that came out of the workshop.

Natalie Evans was supposed to speak about "Research integrity and research ethics experiences: a comparative study of Croatia, the Netherlands, and Spain" but there was some planning mix-up so Jillian Barr took over and spoke about research integrity in Australia, which was a shame for me, because that is what she talked about at the pre-conference workshop.

Dr. Sonja Ochsenfeld-Repp has been Deputy Head of Division Quality and Programme Management, German Research Foundation, since 2016. She spoke about the new Draft Code of Conduct "Guidelines for safeguarding good scientific practice". The old white paper was first published in 1998 [as a reaction to a very large academic misconduct scandal, this was not mentioned], a revision is underway since 2017. 

I asked about how many researchers in Germany actually know about and understand these guidelines, she assured me that everyone does. My own experience shows that this is not the case, there are quite a number of university heads who are unaware of the procedures and guidelines set out, even if it is published on their own web pages. 

I spoke with another researcher afterwards who conducted an actual study investigating how many people did, indeed, know about and understand the guidelines. The results appear to be sobering, I'll see if I can get a hold of concrete results.

Sergey Konovalov, Russian Science Foundation, Moscow

Research ethics in Russia: challenges for the Russian Science Foundation

RSF has existed for 5 years now, but has less than 10% of the federal budget allocated for science. They audit the accounting of the grants: Business class instead of coach, fancy furniture for the bosses' cabin. They don't touch the scientific part, only if the expenses are related to the research.

I asked about Dissernet and if that shows that they need to look beyond the economics to the science itself. He says that they have zero tolerance for plagiarism, but the researchers are themselves responsible for the scientific correctness of what they research. I'm afraid that he doesn't understand my question.

Update 2019-06-18: Sergey writes: "Regrettably, I did not manage to answer your question about Dissernet and if that shows that we need to look beyond the economics to the science itself. Frankly speaking, Dissernet has nothing to do with the Russian Science Foundation activities as they check the the thesises and dissertations and we deal with the project proposals, which is somewhat different. 

Maybe, you missed the point that we do check not only financial part of the projects but also the scientific part (not by RSF staff but it is done by our expert council members), which is equally important to us.

We do not have much of plagiarism concerns but we strictly check the scientific acknowledgements (funding source should be properly indicated in the RSF-funded publications) and duplication of proposal contens submitted to RSF and other funding agencies [...]; these two scientific issues are in our view one of the most common examples of unethical behaviour of researchers in Russia. At least, in our experience (again, our programs cover only 10% of researchers and 15% of research organisations in Russia)."
Session: Predators

I am quite interested in the entire predatory publisher phenomenon, so I decided to attend this session, although there were at least two others in parallel with interesting talks. One was on Dissernet, the Russian plagiarism documenting group (but I know about them already) and the other one was a symposium on "Misdirected allegations of breaches of research integrity" with Ivan Oransky from RetractionWatch.

First up was Rick Anderson from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City with "Predators at the gates: citations to predatory journals in mainstream scientific literature". He identified some predatory journals that had published nonsense in sting operations and then took some papers from each of these journals. He then looked at citations to these papers in the Web of Science, ScienceDirect and PLOS. Yes, there were citations to some of these. I was a bit concerned that he didn't look at the papers themselves to see if they made sense, as misguided individuals will publish good science in bad places. 

Next was Donna Romyn, Athabasca University, St Albert, Canada (a virtual university) on "Confronting predatory publishers and conference organizers: a firsthand account".

She decided to attend a supposed predatory conference on purpose and to chart her journey. She submitted an abstract "At risk of being lured by a predatory publisher? Not me!". The paper was accepted within 24 hours, so there must have been rigorous peer-review done.... There was a bit of back and forth about her giving a keynote, she ended up with the exact same abstract but using a different title, "Safeguarding evidence-informed nursing practice from predatory publishers." She attended the conference and found about 60 people in attendance, many unaware of the nature of the conference. During the discussion the site thinkchecksubmit.org came up, it has a good checklist on what to look at before submitting a paper.

Miriam Urlings from Maastricht University, Maastricht, looked at "Selective citation in biomedical sciences: an overview of six research fields". She did a citation network analysis for papers in six focused research fields with around 100 relevant potential citations in order to see if there is citation bias. There were, however, only 1-2 citations for many of the publications and then highly cited ones in each area, so the results were not conclusive.

Eric Fong, University of Alabama, Huntsville (with Allen W. Wilhite) spoke on "The monetary returns of adding false investigators to grant proposals". He developed an interesting economic model for looking to see if adding false investigators (FI) to grant proposals increases the monetary value of total grants over a 5-year period. Then emailed 113.000 potential respondents and had a 9.5 % response rate. Their conclusion: if you add FI to your grants, you apply for more grants, but that does not lead to larger funding per grant application. However, adding FI significantly increases cumulative total grant dollars over a five-year period. 

Vivienne C. Bachelet, Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), Santiago, spoke about the interesting problem of academics putting institutional affiliations on their bylines without actually being employed at the institution. "Author misrepresentation of institutional affiliations: exploratory cross-sectional case study on secondary individual data".

They focused on researchers giving a Chilean university as an affiliation for the year 2016 and tried to verify if the person was actually affiliated with the university. For around 40 % of the authors, it was not possible to verify their connection to the university. This private investigation, done with no funding, was commenced after it became known that one university in Chile was paying prolific, Spanish-speaking researchers, to add an affiliation with their university, presumably to increase some metric the university is measured by.

After this I attended the COPE reception. There was a lot of very good discussion there, and some publishers I had mentioned in my talk were very interested to hear more about my cases.

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A colleage (who wishes to remain unnamed) reported from a parallel session, here's her take on those presentations (edited to fit my format and fix typos):

Session: Prevention 1

Michael Kalichman, UC San Diego, San Diego
Research misconduct: disease or symptom?

He surveyed RIOs on their perceptions of cases, and got some data that research misconduct occurs in cases deficient in Good Research Practices (i.e. maybe what these courses really need to teach is record keeping).

He listed out 10 GPR or lackings and from ~30 RIOs (out of 60 emailed) what practices were in place in cases they had personally investigated. It’s to be expected, but very good talk.

Michael Reisig, Arizona State University, Phoenix
"The perceived prevalence, cause, and prevention of research misconduct: results from a survey of faculty at America’s top 100 universities."

He has a forensic background and corresponded with about 630 respondents about prevalence, causes, and prevention of research misconduct, and found ~50% people surveyed were very much in favor of formal sanctions to prevent future misconduct. 29 percent said that nothing works, and "30%” wanted an integrated approach. QRP pretty common. But the slides went too fast for numbers.

Sudarat Luepongpattana, National Science and Technology Development Agency, Thailand, Bangkok
"Research quality development of the Thailand National Science and Technology Development Agency"

Yet another survey, and found that researchers don’t really know that authorship entails.

Ignacio Baleztena, European Commission, Brussels
"National practices in research integrity in EU member states & associated countries"

I left during this. My understanding was that representatives from 14 countries were going to have meetings, and then more meetings, and then follow a flow chart of meeting and then produce a definition of research integrity. I was getting seriously jetlagged, but that’s the memory. I just don’t understand why we need YET ANOTHER document. Are there any rules of thumb for when these are useful? [This is an excellent observation. Everyone is producing their own documents (sometimes by gently plagiarizing other institutions documents) on academic integrity. But how do we breathe life into them, change the culture? --dww]

[She missed the last talk and went to another session. She caught the tail end of a survey on Finnish atttitudes toward QRP, who said that it was hard to find a definition of research integrity]

Session: Attitudes 3

De-Ming Chau, Universiti Putra Malaysia/Young Scientists Network-Academy of Sciences, Malaysia, Serdang
"Effectiveness of active learning-based responsible conduct of research workshop in improving knowledge, attitude and behaviour among Malaysian researcher"

He did a survey (small sample size) and found that researchers with more experience say they are more likely to “do nothing” if a colleague is engaging in research misconduct

He’s pretty impressive; an NAS grant got him started designing RCR in Malaysia, and the programs are being designed by early career researchers

WCRI 2019 - Day 1a

Day 0 - Day 1a - Day 1b - Day 2 - Day 3

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It was the first full day of the WCRI conference 2019, and oh my, it was full!

It was pouring rain this morning, so I was glad I had the umbrella from the conference swag and my light poncho. I tried the shortcut someone told me about - just walk through the HKU subway station and take all the elevators and escalators. It worked! So now it's a nice walk up to the university.

Charlie Day (CEO, Office of Innovation and Science, Australia) opened the day with a talk on "Research, risk and trust: translating ideas for impact". The talk was dedicated to Paul Taylor, who worked with the thesis that good management of research integrity is an enabler of technological progress and not a blocker. 

He sketched the typical challenges that occur when translating research into economic success and noted that the most innovative people tend to be the ones who are the most difficult to work with. His suggested responses include

• Having policies and processes for research and translation, that create trust
• Researcher education – access to training osvital
• Encouraging researcher mobility
  
  

Maura Hiney (Head of Post-Award and Evaluation at the Health Research Board, Ireland) spoke in an extremely fast manner about "Integrity challenges in evaluating the path to impact". She insisted that we need to move from what we currently measure as research success to somehow measuring how we are bringing better services to the citizenry, improved health and well-being, better GNP returns, more or smarter jobs, safer environment, better quality of life, food security, etc. 

She listed a number of plans and documents that would be useful and discussed some DORA (the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) principles.

I found it interesting that she was encouraging citizen science, enabling people from all walks of life to participate in the scientific review process. In Ireland they have trained 150 randomly selected public reviewers to evaluate research.  

Tracey Bretag managed to get a photo of her comparison of Research Integrity vs. Resposible Research and innovation:

https://www.coalition-s.org/

Maura noted that we can't talk about translation of research into products without discussing Open Science. As part of the controversial Plan S, she noted that in Ireland all publications resulting from public funding must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms; Only OA publications will be considered in applications for funding; and there exists a cap on the cost of OA publications (APCs). A bit of discussion ensued about Plan S :)

A reference was made to the Open Science Partnership Toolkit, I found it here: https://gatesopenresearch.org/articles/3-1442/v1

 

Maria Leptin (EMBO director, Genetics professor at University of Cologne, Germany) then spoke on "What innovation can tell us about responsible conduct of researchers." She quoted Nobel prize winner Andre Geim: "It is better to be wrong that to be boring" and noted that many of his experiments were not exactly ethical (see a description of how one of the experiments came to be).

She feels that the speed of discovery would increase if experimental failures were publishable.

In speaking with young researchers at EMBO she has found these major contributing factors to the discoveries theymade:

• Stable, longer term (5 years +) funding, flexibility
• Ability to make ad hoc decisions and the freedom to follow new ideas
• Intellectual environment with critical and stimulating colleagues, good scientific culture,
• high-level core facilities as infrastructure.

Sounds good!

After coffee I attended the Plagiarism session, as I was speaking there myself.

Nannan Yi (University of Leuven, Southeast University, China)

spoke about "Perceptions of plagiarism by biomedical researchers: an online survey in Europe and China" She conducted a survey by email and had over 1000 responses from Europe and China. A comparison of the answers showed quite a difference in perception in some instances, for example more Europeans reported being unsure if they were plagiarizing than Chinese researchers. More Chinese than Europeans had a perception of ghostwriting as plagiarism. 

Lisa Winstanley (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) looked at extending the traditional definition of plagiarism to include images and art. The problem is that in art there are techniques that might be considered copying: Pastiche, homage, parody. But if they are done on purpose, then it is not academic misconduct. Thus, she insists that students submit a reflection on how they came about to create their artwork that can include statement such as "I decided to create a parody of ....". 

There is not much research on visual plagiarism. Due to the ambiguous boundaries and inadequate adressing in policy documents they do not sufficiently address visual arts educational needs.

She listed some tools useful in finding image sources:

TinEye, iTrace, Google reverse image search, and the Blob filter and showed examples of the various grey areas. I was surprised to learn that in marketing companies will brazenly copy the ad of a competitor, but hiring their own actors and making their own pictures. There were some plagiarism pictures on boredpanda that I picked out from her slides.

She also noted that there is a site, Steal like an Artist, that very nicely explains what is permissable and what is not. 

We had a good discussion on the difference between copyright and plagiarism, a lawyer in the audience noted that he would always go with copyright, as he will probably have more luck with that in court. 

Jerry Hoffman (Southern Institute of Technology, Invercargill, New Zealand) spoke on

"Managing plagiarism and academic fraud in higher degree programmes"

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority (2017) noted that tertiary eucation providers need to have good processes in place to ensure that cheating is detected and will not allow students to pass assessments where they have not met the required standard.

His university has started to offer a two-hour referencing workshop and dissertation workshops where issues of plagiarism and academic fraud are discussed in detail.

The topic is also Addressed in all taught classes to varying degrees, and supervisors discuss plagiarism issues with student. They use Safe-Assign to test for plagiarism, but that usually only finds copies from previous student work, not necessarily things copied from the internet. But using Google can be useful here.

An oral defence is held when there is some suspicion of plgiarism. If serious plagiarism or academic fraud is detected, the result will usually be a failing grade. 

Then I spoke on "A breakdown in communication: journal reactions to information about plagiarism and duplicate publications"

https://twitter.com/Aishoola/status/1135402239562960896

The room was full (maybe 60 people) and we had a very good discussion session.

I got some lunch and tried to visit the poster session but the room was sooooo cramped and there were so many people that I pretty much just managed to visit 3 posters. One I had already photographed yesterday:

This poster from Indonesia was printed with batik on cloth dyed red. The text was put on with wax before the dying! Unfortunately, there had to be a correction, so it is printed on photo paper and stuck on with velcro :)

Matt Hodgkinson had a very nice poster discussing his frustrations as a research integrity person at Hindawi getting universities or national integrity bodies to answer his emails. I sympathize! I can't get Blogger to upload the picture tonight, his tweet links to a picture [that will only show up if I download it and then upload to Google]:

The third poster was about the Contributor Roles Taxonomy CRediT. It's a brilliant idea, but there was no way to get a picture without poking my elbow into someone's eye.

That's just half of Monday, I'm exhausted and heading to bed. More tomorrow!

Update to include another image.

WCRI 2019 - Day 0

Day 0 - Day 1a - Day 1b - Day 2 - Day 3

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I am currently attending the World Conference on Academic Integrity (WCRI 2019) in Hong Kong, sponsored by a travel grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). It is quite an international conference with over 700 attendees from all over the world, although of course given the location there are many Asia-Pacific countries represented. I will be blogging about the talks and workshops that I attend, which are only a small fraction of the talks held, as there are seven tracks in parallel. As usual, there is one paper in each track that I really want to hear, so I will have to flip three coins to see which session I attend.
The conference is being held at the University of Hong Kong, a large university of high-rises, terraces, and steep stairways nestled in between the skyscrapers of Western Hong Kong.

I attended two pre-conference workshops before the opening ceremonies.

1. How to investigate breaches of research integrity and research misconduct

The workshop was designed by Daniel Barr (RMIT Melbourne, Australia), Ton Hol (University of Utrecht) and Paul Taylor(†, formerly of RMIT) and there were around 50 participants. Three talks were held and there was some discussion.
In his introduction, Dan Barr proposed this definition of research integrity:

Research integrity is the coherent and consistent adherence to a set of principles that underpin the trustworthiness of research.

He noted that people are not consistent – they might behave well one month, and use questionable practices the next month. From this I take it that the focus should be on the research and thus the publication or non-publication itself, not on the person.

Ton Hall, head of the School of Law at the University of Utrecht, then spoke on handling allegations of research misconduct in the Netherlands. The Diederik Stapel case appears to have been quite a force in getting Dutch universities to focus on both preventing research misconduct as well as formalizing the investigative process.

He first looked into the reasons why an institution needs to deal with accusations of research misconduct. Above all, the public's trust in science should not be affected by faulty research. There are other reasons of course, not only giving satisfaction to the accuser, but also to protect the reputation of the institution and of the accused researcher, and of course to improve the local research practices. He then explained the difference between an accusatorial or an inquisitorial approach. That means, an institution can either respond to an allegation, or it can start investigations on its own.

He noted that complaints from anonymous accusers can be investigated if there are compelling public insterests or the factual basis can be investigated without additional input from the complaintant (for example in documented plagiarism cases).

Jillian Barr, Director Ethics and Integrity National Health and Medical Reserach Council Australian Government, then gave the view on investigating breaches from the view of an Australian funding agency. In 2018, Australia published a code of Responsible Conduct in Research. There are many additional guides published, among them one on investigating potential breaches of the code.

One of the most important aspects in convening a panel for investigating potential breaches is deciding who should be on the panel, as there are potential consequences for those involved. Which members of the department or other departments should be incuded, should there be external members, should they have prior experience with dealing with such issues, how well do they need to know the code, do they have to understand the relevant discipline, are there conflicts of interest or gender / diversity issues to be addressed? And of course, who should chair such a panel, someone with legal experience? Many questions and no easy answers.

Karin Wallace, from the Secretariat for the Responsible Conduct of Research in Canada, was up next. The body she represents sees plagiarism as one of the largest problems, as well as misrepresentation of credentials. However, each case is unique, so it is not easy to set up guidelines for sanctioning.

Investigation reports do not have names on them, so that the focus for the investigation committee is on the facts of the case, not the institution or person involved. She suggests having a standing investigation committee that is familiar with research integrity, with subject matter expertise filled in on an ad hoc basis. She cautions that external members should be familiar with research integrity procedures and be in close proximity, in order to facilitate their participation.

Finally, Chris Graf, from COPE and the Director of Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics at Wiley, gave us the point of view of the publisher in dealing with breaches of integrity. Wiley, a large scientific publisher, has a number of people working full-time on this topic. 

He noted that research publishers create and maintain the formal "version of record". When an error is identified, corrections are restricted to an equally formal set of permanent options: Corrections, experessions of concern, retractions, withdrawals. The latter is what he calls the "nuclear option" to be used when a paper must be deleted for legal reasons or other serious circumstances, however, the formal bibliographic information is left at the DOI. 

He presented some interesting numbers of the various types of case they handled in 2018 and 2019 to date:

58 Misconduct or Questionable behavior

45 Authorship

43 Data issues

34 Redundant or Duplicate publications

33 Plagiarism

30 Copyright

30 Correction of the literature

26 Legal issues

22 Consent for Publication

20 Questionable or Unethical Research

19 Mistakes

13 Conflicts of Interest

6 Peer review

5 Whistleblowers

5 Funding

4 Contributorship

3 Social Media

2 Editorial Independence

2. Workhop on "The Embassy of Good Science"

Guy Wissershoven opened the session by briefly explaining the project and the web site, which is not yet online. It seemed that about half of the room (also around 50 persons in attendance) was somehow involved in the project, I am not sure but it seemed to be funded by the EU. 

I found a short description on the web:

‘The Embassy of Good Science’ is a European initiative to make the normative framework informing research ethics and research integrity (RE+RI) easily accessible, share RE+RI knowledge and experiences, and foster active participation of the scientific community.
The development of The Embassy platform is underpinned by a stakeholder consultation, which consisted of a series of focus groups in three EU countries with diverse levels of research and innovation (The Netherlands, Spain and Croatia, n=59) and an online community discussion with participants from across Europe and beyond (n=52). Participants included researchers, editors, RE or RI committee members, policy-makers, and funders.

It is an excellent idea to collect up the information about research ethics and research integrity, as well as the various guidelines that exist into some sort of easy-to-use repository. I was intrigued by the idea that they want to provide a forum for discussion about cases and issues relating to research activity, but there was just a rudimentary implementation of tools to facilitate the discussion and no clear concept of how they will attract and retain interested persons to the discussions.

The project will be continuing until 2021, so I do hope that they acquire some deeper understanding of how to cultivate an active community.


Opening Ceremony

The opening ceremony in the Grand Hall that looks like it easily seats 1000 people included the usual words of greetings. Then there were two talks given.

Guoqing Dai (Director-General of the Department of Supervision and Scientific Integrity, Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of the People's Republic of China, Beijing) spoke about his department, founded in 2018, and tasked with setting up concerted efforts for coping with new challenges for research integrity that have been identified in China. Multiple measures will be undertaken in China to promote research integrity:

1. Constantly improve the institutional arrangements
2. Trying to establish sound operational mechanisms
3. Strictly investigating and punishing breach behaviors (497 researchers were punished last year)
4. Strengthening the dissemination and education about research integrity (16 million students recieved instruction last year)
5. Deepening the reform of science and technology evaluation.

Alan Finkel, Australia's Chief Scientist, from Canberra, used a funny metaphor to describe the current scientific publication process with four million articles published every year: A bridge. What used to be perhaps a simple structure to connect A with B (the scientist with the reader) is now a triple-decker, multi-lane freeway. It's not about to collapse, but showing many signs of stress. The publication bridge must be kept open, but there are currently too many trucks with wrong cargo or contraband (there are over 20.000 retractions in the Retraction Watch database), or with useless cargo that no one wants. Some drivers speed madly in order to make as many trips as possible. There are smugglers (predatory publishers) and researchers jumping off the bridge into the wild waters of open science. 

He identified the biggest problem as the incentives. Systems adapt to follow the incentives, so the incentive system in academia must move away from counting publications and look to quality.  As an engineer he proposed a quality assurance initiative that includes mandatory research integrity training for all researchers (not just new ones) and some version of the Rule of Five (maximum of x publications in the last y years for values of x and y close to 5). There should be a "Publication Process Quality Assurance" seal that is positively awarded to journals, and grant-giving institutions should insist on publications only in these journals.

After this well-recieved talk, a Chinese "Lion's Dance" was presented, and then we were treated to some appetizers and a drink. It was lovely to meet old acquaintences and meet new people active in the field.

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Updated 2019-06-03 to include Karin Wallace's institution

Science Integrity Digest

Elisabeth Bik, the champion spotter of duplicated or altered images, has started a new blog. Science Integrity Digest is where she will be blogging about problematic science in addition to the tweeting that she does. I'd set a bookmark on this site and they read up about Magic External Qi.

News from around the world

Again, just a few links to interesting topics from around the world.

• There has been a case of a Belgian sociologist at the KU Leuven festering since 2017, according to Google Translate's version of a Dutch Wikipedia article. He has apparently re-published papers of other researchers and published work of co-workers that was not yet published. According to an article in De Standaard from 23 April 2019, he resigned his position as head of the "Center for Political Science" in 2018, but remains a full professor at the university.
• The Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK) has finally investigated cases of academic misconduct, mostly plagiarism, in 27 master't theses from universities of applied sciences, according to YLE, the Finnish broadcasting body. Most of them contained clear plagiarism. Dr. Erja Moore (author of the blog "Plagiointitutkija" in Finnish) chose the theses more or less at random from the open access thesis repository, investigated them, prepared documentation, and informed the universities in question of the problems. TENK Secretary General Sanna Kaisa Spoof has stated that the situation is serious and worrying. Dr. Moore will be presenting her results at the ENAI (European Network for Academic Integrity) "Plagiarism Across Europe and Beyond" Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, June 19-21, 2019.
• VroniPlag Wiki just published a documentation (in German) of text parallels found in the doctoral dissertation of the current German Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, Franziska Giffey. The press has been reporting on this since they "discovered" the work-in-progress in February 2019.

Links

Links galore!

It seems like time is passing so quickly and I never get around to posting the links that have been collecting as tabs in my browser. So I'm cleaning out my tabs, here's the first round of links:

• Top Chinese politicians have been found to have plagiarized in their PhDs, report the Hong Kong Free Press and Digital Journal. 
• The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel had to admit that one of their prize-winning journalists, Claas Relotius, was actually fabricating or embellishing his stories. They published a list of the fabricated stories, as then
  The story broke when two residents of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, USA began fact-checking the story Relotius published about the town: "And yet, he reported on very little actual truth about Fergus Falls life. In 7,300 words he really only got our town’s population and average annual temperature correct, and a few other basic things, like the names of businesses and public figures, things that a child could figure out in a Google search."
• A Houston-based company that sold completed assignments primarily to Chinese-speaking students in Australia and New Zealand has settled out of court in New Zealand: Case described in Stuff, settlement at Radio New Zealand. The company is still in existence, because what they do is not (yet) illegal in many countries. The Times Higher Education published an article in March 2019 on the problem, identifying international students as the problem, although in the interview with Tracey Bretag she makes it clear that it is not a problem with international students per se, but with students who do not have the language skills necessary to do university work.   
• There's a app for that - Quarz reports that in South Korea ghostwriters can be hired by app.

There will be more to come!