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The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia has various codes and policies on responsible research. The page contains an overview of the following codes and guidelines:

• The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research
• The National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research
• The Australian Code for the care and use of animals for scientific purposes
• The NHMRC Research Integrity and Misconduct Policy
• Factsheets on reporting research misconduct
• Information on the Australian Research Integrity Committee

This is a factual case describing how an immunologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Luk Van Parijs, was found to be solely responsible for more than 11 incidents of data fabrication in grant applications and papers submitted between 1997 and 2004. '"`UNIQ--ref-000001EB-QINU`"'

Van Parijs avoided jail after several prominent scientists wrote letters begging for clemency on his behalf and was sentenced to home detention, community service and financial restitution.'"`UNIQ--ref-000001EC-QINU`"' '"`UNIQ--references-000001ED-QINU`"'

The Responsible Conduct of Research Framework describes policies and requirements related to applying for and managing funds from three Canadian Agencies (the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)). Requirements related to performing research, disseminating results, and the processes that institutions and agencies must follow in the event of an allegation of a breach of policy are also outlined.

Three cases are presented. Are these cases Research Misconduct, Questionable Research Practices or Responsible Conduct of Research? Participants are asked for their normative judgement, after which a discussion takes place. At the end of the case, it is explained what was decided in the real case.

The moderator asks the participants not only to make their normative judgement, but also to think about why. Which norms and values are at stake? On which norms and values did you base your judgement? Which values are in conflict and which are more important to you?

Members of The Embassy of Good Science have developed a set of eight scenarios for educational purposes and to stimulate strategic thinking about issues in research ethics and research integrity.

This scenario presents a hypothetical narrative concerning collaborative working between academia and industry and the links with research integrity.

It focuses on issues regarding:

• Conflicts of Interest between academia and industry;
• Data usage and data privacy;
• HARKing (Hypothesizing after the results are known);
• Preregistration of studies;
• Authorship criteria for academic publications;
• The duties of corresponding authors;
• Non-publication of results;
• Divergences in research integrity standards and processes between international collaborators.

It is interspersed with questions and resource suggestions that help guide researchers, research ethics committees ('RECs'), research integrity offices ('RIOs') and research administrators in their deliberations concerning the research integrity issues raised by the narrative.

This document presents a guide for young researchers on the area of authorship, which many people agree is one of the more confused areas. It helps new researchers prevent and resolve authorship problems. In particular it provides:

• suggestions for good authorship practice that should reduce the incidence of such dilemmas,
• advice on what to do when authorship problems do arise, and
• a glossary of key concepts in authorship, with some reading lists and websites for those who wish to take this further.

Een online Community of Practice omgeving die specifiek is ingericht is samen met anderen te werken aan je onderzoeksvaardigheden. In de Communityomgeving kun je op elk gewenst moment (mede)studenten in een besloten online omgeving uitnodigen om samen te werken, te leren, te discussiëren en te delen.

A researcher informally acquires knowledge of unpublished research results that support her theory.

She is invited to conference at an institution where she hopes to work. Is she allowed to share the research results which are not her own?

This case concerns the 2013 book publication of ‘’the Tyranny of the Weak’, published by a professor on the history of North Korea. In the book the author presents his historical research on how North Korea ‘survived’ the Cold War.

In 2014 another historian noticed several irregularities in the sources of the work of the professor and started investigating these irregularities. Many of these sources referred to archives, and were written in Russian, German, Chinese or Korean. The other historian decided to visit one of the archives in person to check the original sources. He states “[I checked] the collection there to reconstruct the original archival locations (…). This way it could be fully verified that the vast majority of the Russian archival citations from 1957-60 were invalid, because the cited files could not be found either in the Seoul collection or in the (essentially identical) Wilson Center collection.”

Upon this discovery, he also reached out to an archive in Berlin, where most sources could also not be located, or contained different information as suggested in the book. In addition, as the historian points out on Retractionwatch, several uncanny similarities appear to exist between "Tyranny of the Weak" and his own book on a similar topic.

The pofessor and book author, replied stating that “[t]he book was reviewed by two expert external reviewers before publication. In addition, before the book was published three years ago I shared the entire manuscript with one of the scholars who is currently critical of the book and is a renowned expert on the Russian sources on North Korea. At that time, this scholar did not find any problem with my use of sources, although he made a number of other comments which I incorporated in the final version of the book.” In 2015 the book earned 52 corrections in the new publication.

This is a hypothetical scenario of a junior researcher who discovers gaps between previously kept records of lab data and what has been published. The scenario poses the question of whether the student researcher should report these inconsistencies or not, and how should he proceed.

The American Society of Physics poses the following question and encourages critical discussion: 'Is this really a case of misconduct in handling data and record keeping? Or, is it the result of an honest mistake?' Several alternative scenarios of why such inconsistencies can occur are discussed.

A paper was submitted to our journal. The managing editor was concerned about patient information in the paper and queried the authors. The authors responded that the data were collected from routine samples and so consent was never obtained. The patients were lost to follow-up, and there was no ethics committee approval as it involved the study of existing data, but they did discuss with the institutional review board who said it was exempt.

The cohort was 2500 patients, all with one syndrome, in one hospital. The paper contains two tables that display data from 12 patients: sex, age, presenting symptom, as well as laboratory parameters and outcome.

A journal received an enquiry from a reader stating that they had found some discrepancies in the spectra published in the electronic supporting information for a published paper. They suggested that the discrepancies would be consistent with the spectra being manually ‘cleaned’. If this were true, the characterisation and purity of the compounds reported in the paper would be called into question.

The editor checked the spectra in close detail and verified that the discrepancies that the reader had identified were a reasonable cause for concern. The editor also checked the author’s related papers in the journal and identified a total of four papers that were affected by similar discrepancies in the spectra. When the editor contacted the lead author to discuss the concerns, they explained that ‘cleaning’ spectra to remove impurity peaks was not a practice that was carried out by their research group, and they did not believe that it had occurred in this instance. However, the researcher who had carried out the analysis had now left the group and the original data files where no longer available.

As a comparison with the original data files could not be made, the journal approached an independent expert to obtain a second opinion on the evidence available in the published spectra. The expert confirmed that there was clear evidence that the spectra had been altered and that this could be consistent with an attempt to overestimate the yields for the reported reactions.

Following this, the journal contacted the director of the institute to request their assistance in determining whether the spectra had in fact been altered. The director consulted with the lead author and the head of their facility. They confirmed that it was not possible to locate the original data due to a limitation of their archival system. They stated that their internal review had not found any ‘intentional altering of the spectra’. They stated that on that basis, the papers should not be suspected and should be allowed to stand.

This recommendation runs contrary to the evidence that we believe can be seen in the spectra, but in the absence of the original data files it is difficult to make a conclusive judgement.

A research group publishes several papers on an important finding in high-impact journals. Months later, a new graduate student is asked to replicate this research and reproduce the findings.

The student finds he is unable to reproduce the findings, and even has an explanation for this impossibility.

The following framework supports the ethical preparation, implementation, and evaluation of participatory processes in research funding and (applied) research & innovation (R&I). It helps the user understand the context in which they undertake a participatory process and guides them through mapping and addressing the ethical challenges and limitations that might arise. The framework was developed with a focus on the activities of research funding organizations (RFOs), including participation in strategy development and agenda setting, call topic definition and formulation, (project and proposal) evaluation processes, and R&I projects. It thus addresses different contexts, resources, and needs that impact decisions on how to conduct participatory processes in an ethical manner, and provides guidance to ensure stakeholder participation is executed without disregarding values such as fairness, transparency, equality, and privacy. Through this, it might also support future ethics review and evaluation procedures that assess the planning and implementation of participatory processes and offer a common frame of reference for different stakeholders to discuss and understand participation in R&I.

The Ethics Framework and Guidelines for Participatory Processes in the Activities of Research Funding Organizations were developed in the context of the H2020-project PRO-Ethics [grant number 872441]. The framework reflects the theoretical and empirical data and experiences collected in this time, as analyzed and synthesized by the authors of this document with support from the project consortium. The content of the document is the sole responsibility of its author(s) and any opinions expressed herein should not be taken to represent an official position of the European Commission.

This framework supports the ethical preparation, implementation, and evaluation of participatory processes in research funding and (applied) research & innovation (R&I). It helps the user understand the context in which they undertake a participatory process and guides them through mapping and addressing the ethical challenges and limitations that might arise.

The framework addresses different contexts, resources, and needs that impact decisions on how to conduct participatory processes in an ethical manner for Research Funding Organisations (RFOs), and provides guidance to ensure stakeholder participation is executed without disregarding values such as fairness, transparency, equality, and privacy.

These guidelines were developed by the European Commission and provide guidance on how to get a proposal ready for ethics approval. When following the recommendations in the document, the research proposal will be in line with international, European Union and national laws. The guidelines pay particular attention to the following research topics.

1. Human embryos & foetuses
2. Human beings
3. Human cells or tissues
4. Personal data
5. Animals
6. Non-EU countries
7. Environment, health & safety
8. Dual use
9. Exclusive focus on civil applications
10. Potential misuse of research results
11. Other ethics issues