Instead of engaging, institutions want to keep hiding from integrity problems

Opposing new ORI guidelines looks terrible

Two new stories out about the update to the Office of Research Integrity guidelines on research misconduct: one in the Wall Street Journal and another in Inside Higher Ed where I’m quoted. Before the institutional comments came back on the revisions, we had an editorial in Science from Ivan Oransky and Barbara Redman saying that the guidelines don’t go far enough and a story from Jeff Mervis with a lot of the same sources. Now, the institutions are circling the wagons to try to keep them from going through.

This looks terrible. While the universities are citing real concerns about process and confidentiality, the crisis has gotten to the point where the public is never going to hear that. So, at the very time we’re dealing with escalating mistrust of science, the institutions are saying “just trust us” when allegations of research misconduct arise. They are opposing measures that would require them to do more investigations or disclose more information, even though many are getting hundreds of millions or even $1B+ in support from the public.

I feel for the difficult situation the administrators are in, having been in those situations myself. But trying to wait these things out just delays the inevitable. Eventually, the information will come out. It came out in the Stanford case, it came out in the Harvard/Gino case. With this many reporters working on these things, it can’t hold forever. And even when it survives investigative journalism, many of these cases lead to lawsuits where information comes out in discovery or outside investigations where the material is disclosed.

Journals, rightfully, bear a lot of responsibility in these cases. We are, after all, the ones who select the peer reviewers and determine whether the paper is sound. We push the button that publishes it, and we’re responsible for publishing any corrections or retractions that may be required. And a lot of critics think that part of the reason why we don’t make corrections is because we’re embarrassed to admit we made a mistake. Some of that is probably true, but in this environment, the journals have started being more forthcoming. Not enough yet, of course, but we’re moving in that direction while the institutions are going backwards.

So when reporters and sleuths contact us about papers or post about them on the special website PubPeer, we try to engage with the authors and institutions to see if a correction or retraction is needed. We follow COPE guidelines that require us to do this. If we get no response or an unsatisfactory one, the guidelines are vague about how long we should wait before we take action. We are trying to act faster, but sometimes we get threatened with legal demand letters from the authors or institutions trying to stop us from doing anything. The reporters and sleuths are naturally skeptical as to whether we are actually unable do anything. The recent comments that the institutions have made about the ORI revisions at least help us show that we are truly getting stonewalled much of the time.

One particularly tone deaf set of responses suggested that universities were not responsible for following the discourse about their papers and responding. As the WSJ said:

“Some schools urged the ORI to explicitly not require action on comments published on sites like PubPeer unless the allegations were also flagged directly to the institution or funding agency’s research integrity office.”

So the scientific enterprise is effectively saying to taxpayers that we enjoy spending their money on research but don’t think we should have to do any extra work to make sure it’s deployed responsibly. With deep cuts at NSF and NIH — and more potentially on the horizon in this political environment — it’s hard to imagine worse timing for this.