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Independent board needed to promote research integrity, US panel says

BMJ 2017; 357 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j1879 (Published 13 April 2017) Cite this as: BMJ 2017;357:j1879
  1. Michael McCarthy
  1. Seattle

A new US report calls for the creation of an independent advisory board to help scientists, scientific institutions, journals, and other participants tackle research misconduct and reduce questionable practices, which, while they might not represent misconduct, harm research enterprise.1

The report was prepared by a committee convened by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to deal with growing concerns that, despite efforts to promote integrity, serious misconduct continues to be reported, the number of journal article retractions has risen, and a substantial proportion of published results in some fields have been shown to be not reproducible.

The committee said: “This report does not conclude that the research enterprise is broken. However, the research enterprise faces serious challenges in creating the appropriate conditions to foster and sustain the highest standards of integrity. To meet these challenges, deliberate steps must be taken to strengthen the self correcting mechanisms that are an implicit part of research.” The committee was led by Robert Nerem, of the Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.

The report endorsed the definition of research misconduct adopted in 1992 by an earlier panel2 on research integrity. That panel defined misconduct as “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reporting research.” However, the new report said practices that the earlier panel labeled “questionable,” such as “the misleading use of statistics that falls short of falsification, and failure to retain sufficient research data,” should now be recognized as being detrimental to research.

The report recommended that the research community greatly improve and update their practices and policies to tackle the threats to integrity. “Lack of attention to, or tolerance of, detrimental research practices by stakeholders makes it difficult to expose misconduct, wastes human and financial resources, impairs the overall quality of research, and diminishes public trust in science,” the report said.

To assist in this effort, the panel called for the creation of an independent research integrity advisory board to assist stakeholders to develop processes to minimize practices that are detrimental to research. The board would give “advice, support, encouragement, and, where helpful, advocacy on what needs to be done to promote research integrity,” but would have no direct role in investigations, regulation, or accreditation.

To improve reproducibility, the report recommended that researchers, their institutions, and scientific publishers establish policies and supporting infrastructure, such as online data repositories, to “ensure that information sufficient for a person knowledgeable about the field and its techniques to reproduce reported results is made available at the time of publication or as soon as possible after publication.”

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