A new report from a UK Parliament committee calls for scientific publishers to correct and retract papers much quicker than they currently do, for the sake of research integrity and reproducibility.
The Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee of the House of Commons issued its report today, following an inquiry to which Retraction Watch and one of our cofounders, Ivan Oransky, provided evidence. Many others also gave evidence, including sleuth Dorothy Bishop.
The report is an extensive look at current issues of reproducibility and research integrity, and includes many recommendations. About the role of scientific publishers, the report says:
Publishers should support academics who report issues with published research in their journals and should commit to timely publication of research error corrections and retractions where necessary—in our view this process should not take longer than two months.
As readers of Retraction Watch know, the process of correcting or retracting a paper often takes years. That average length of time has not changed significantly in years, either. In a passage quoted by the committee in its report, we note that
A growing group of ‘sleuths’ has found thousands of problematic papers, most of which have yet to be corrected or retracted.
The committee also called for publishers to provide sufficient outlets for negative or confirmatory studies.
Beyond recommendations for publishers, the report recommended funding for replication studies and for the inclusion of statistical experts and software developers on research teams, that researchers publish their data and code in open-access repositories, and that undergraduate, postgraduate, and early career researchers receive training on reproducibility.
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How is that going to work?
Are they going to have regulator, such as Ofsted for schools, or Ofgem for gas and electricity, and put journals which don’t make retractions within 2 months under “special measures” the way schools which get poor performance scores are taken over by new managers, or fine the journals as if they were utility companies?
How would that work for journals based in the U.K., let alone for foreign, or fly-by-night journals?
I’m all for fining journals and publishers, it happens to people all the time.
Admittedly I haven’t read the report myself, but if they really want to use such a blanket requirement, it will do more harm than good (as all such overly generalising measures do). I can easily imagine cases where a thorough investigation can take longer than two months.
Who is going to decide if a paper is going to be retracted? At present it usually depends on the home institution asking the journal to retract a paper, although sometimes the journal editors retract papers against the wishes of the authors and home institutions.
Sweden has gone for a system where in effect an administrative court, which is independent of scientific institutions, investigates allegations of scientific misconduct and decides which papers should be retracted. This system, Npof, has only been up and running a couple of years so it is too early to tell if it is effective.
I think that it’s a bit too ambitious.
Less than 2 years will be a good evolution right now …
https://npof.se/en/research-misconduct/
“The National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (Npof) is allowed to investigate only deviations (breaches) of the types covered by the definition of “research misconduct””
In Sweden the government set up Npof, for what stands for read above to investigate “research misconduct”.
As of yet the U.K. does not have anything like Npof. There is UKRIO, run by James Parry, and now a bevy of secretaries under him, but it does not investigate scientific misconduct, but rather hands out leaflets to universities on how to investigate scientific misconduct.
The whole point of Npof in Sweden was to take the investigation of scientific misconduct out of the hands of universities as they are conflicted when in comes to misconduct within their own walls. Any U.K. version would be better to avoid James Parry and UKRIO as a starting place.