In a recent Science editorial, Barbara Redman and our Ivan Oransky called for a boost to the budget and authority of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). In this letter, a nephrologist and researcher suggests one potential way to fight fraud.
Bravo on your editorial, which pointed out the pathetic funding level for an agency that is supposed to put a check on self-interested fabrication and distortion in scientific research. Perhaps universities and influential individuals who feel the threat of censure have collaborated to minimize that risk by throttling the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Regardless, billions of dollars each year are probably lost in misdirected efforts based on false information. That is a national tragedy.
During the time I was an undergraduate at Caltech we had an honor code that was very clear: You cheat, lie or fabricate and you are at best heavily censured, and likely out. We learned that one’s research notes were our reputation, and that our supervising senior researchers would often and unpredictably ask to review them. It was daunting and occasionally very stressful, but led to a lifelong ethic that stood me in good stead when I went into medicine, where peoples’ lives were at stake based on what we wrote and did.
One tool I used while working for the Veterans Administration (VA) could come in useful in the wider context of research. The VA has an electronic health record (EHR) called “CPRS” that is based on “write once/read many.” Every note and every prescription is encrypted and stored in a way that cannot be erased. You can enter a note amending an erroneous entry, but the original entry can never be erased. It uses a lot of memory but assures that if an audit is needed for any reason the original entry will be available for review. Perhaps having lab notes based on such a digital system would raise the bar to post-hoc alteration high enough to discourage at least that form of cheating.
Of course, where prestige, money and fame are concerned there is no way to totally stop cheating. But an un-erasable digital form of lab notebook might help to at least reduce fabrication and manipulation in a world where lying seems to have become an accepted form of behavior for altogether too many in science.
Following graduation from Caltech, TJ O’Neil spent 45 years in the Air Force and VA as a clinical nephrologist after completing a fellowship in the lab of Jay Stein at the University of Texas, San Antonio. He is currently developing a patient kidney disease education program and a dialysis safety device.
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What does ORI do? Why do they money? Does RW need money too?
Make a 3 strike rule. If three professors from a school commit fraud, the school is debarred from government funding for 5 years.
I bet that would get the schools to pay attention!
Yeah, no. I don’t want to lose access to funding because a moron in a different department decided to write/buy AI-COVID-IoT-DNA-vaccine crap fake research. Not to mention that the schools have no ability to oversee all the research being done in a campus with 50k people in it. So no, just no.
Are there a lot of NSF/NIH funded researchers buying paper mill research? I haven’t seen any such papers coming out of R1 research universities. I don’t see any ORI reports noting the same. So I think your scenario is a non-issue.
Universities need to share some obligation to taxpayers. They are the entity accepting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
No, make every university/college return all monies used for funding the fraudulent research AND then debar the researcher(s) that committed the fraud for life AND the school for a period not less than 5 years from receiving ANY government funding.
Doing that would certainly get the universities/colleges to pay attention. That’s for sure.
“Doing that would certainly get the universities/colleges to pay attention.”
Pay attention to what? The problem is that fraud and research dishonesty are usually found after the fact. None of my colleagues would tolerate some university bureaucrat looking over their shoulder all day, or requiring that every abstract, every paper, every report, and every article be vetted by some administration office first.
>None of my colleagues would tolerate some university bureaucrat looking over their shoulder all day, or requiring that every abstract, every paper, every report, and every article be vetted by some administration office first.
That’s what happens in every GLP/GMP lab in industry. Why can’t academics tolerate it?
Do you have any suggested resources re: GLP/GMP labs and how they work? There’s distrust of the unknown. Academics are no different than anyone else!
Also, since such labs appear to be rooted in industry practices, are they workable for more pure discovery approaches? (Obviously that’s an idealized picture of science in the academy, but that’s what we’re supposed to aim for).
Along this same vein (had a very similar experience at the University of Colorado, pharmacology/toxicology graduate program), publishers should follow this same precedent as your lab books and VA digital record keeping. Original manuscript submission, as well as any pre-publication revisions to the final product including the discussion between reviewers and authors should be openly available to the readership post-publication thereby providing a degree of accountability – essentially, Open Peer Review that has seen very slow to be implemented across the STEM publishing spectrum. These changes should be very clear, in particular, the submissions’ authorship changes, corresponding author email changes are a hallmark of publishing system subversion by the papermillers among the many other flags. This would begin to lend more credibility and accountability of the publishers who have sent a lot of the yard trash into our literature repositories (cough Hindawi cough). If publishers are to reclaim their “gatekeepers” role , this could be a start.
The electronic health record proposed, i.e., write once/read many, is very much like the expectations for Good Laboratory and Good Manufactuing Practices. If you want to change information, you need a record of what was changed and why – and the original unedited data should still be available.
If it’s done with paper records, you can draw a line through the original data (so that it can still be read) and then provide a rationale for the change.
Having read Retraction Watch for many years, it’s notable how few retractions come from industry. It’s likely that GLP/GMP prevents much fraud. Data integrity is a top inspection target for FDA and similar agencies across the globe.
So people will have two notebooks, one where they write their actual notes, and the official, write-once/read-many (WORM), where they cut and paste what they are reasonably certain of.
The other key component missing in this is the CalTech senior researchers who can make an “daunting and occasionally very stressful” review. This works, because the senior researcher to a large extent know more than the students do (with the possible exception of the thesis domain) and hierarchy is enforced by the institution.
Where is the analogy to this in modern academia and the splintering of the sub-disciplines? Is it not precisely the point of tenured professors that they are free beyond their peers from persueing what they think the right direction is?
The main thing WORM might help with is keeping poaching at bay. But now we are very close to the public repositories of expected outcomes and similar.