FST JOURNAL

Summary:

• We are moving from a notion of Research Integrity to a notion of the integrity of the researcher
• We need to hang on to the broad notion of science because one of the problems with a narrow version of science and thinking is that it emphasises a particular kind of integrity that misses the social context of the scientific endeavour
• We need knowledge professionals to help us and we must look after our librarians because they are our  ’datanauts’, navigators of data
• We need more ‘meta-humanists’ in metascience to land the message that science is something very complex, that is constructed by us to talk about ourselves.

When I started as a classicist, we got our notions of Research Integrity rather by osmosis. I think much of what we learnt about Research Integrity was from reviews, particularly book reviews, which at that stage was one of the most important aspects of the knowledge economy. We knew you had to be careful about the way that you cited things from stories, like the (no doubt) apocryphal tutorial, where the student stumbles through reading an essay, stops halfway through and says, “I'm so sorry, sir. I can't read this person's handwriting”. Now when we look at the framework from the UKRI, we have our own policy on governance of good research practice, and that guidance forms part of our grant funding terms. We're a signatory to the UK Concordat which supports the Research Integrity that we have been hearing about. We are also a part of a call from that working group which is asking the research sector to participate in a consultation to shape revisions to the Concordat. We’re also training people in a way that is rather more systematic than the one I've described for myself above. For instance, the Future Leadership Fellows have an enormous amount of training and resources available to them including an annual conference which addresses issues of Research Integrity, and open access. 

Philosophy and Research Integrity

We often hear some classic comparative statements such as what you do as a philosopher is not the same as what you'll do as particle physicist, and I just want to think about whether that's entirely true. One of the changes that has happened, I think, is that we've moved from a notion of Research Integrity to a notion of the integrity of a researcher. It seems to me to be quite similar, whatever you're doing. In fact, one of the things one might say about the arts and humanities in particular is this as it has become more of a team game rather than an individual game. We talk a lot about Research Integrity in science and sometimes it’s the case that when we say science, we mean that very British anglophone, narrow version of science. We've lost the notion of science in the broader sense of the word. 

I think that this is significant because almost everything we've heard about how you do Research Integrity, draws from the humanities. We talk about trust, honesty, openness, and integrity, and these are ethical concepts, They are about the way that you approach knowledge and information and they're not necessarily owned by arts and humanities, but there may be a misalignment when you take ‘humanities’ concepts like those and address them to science, or narrowly defined science. I'm interested in this, because there's a question about what happens in the future when you take notions like individuality, personhood and trust (which are very human-centric and work brilliantly for me when I'm writing my book), and you apply them to a world where it is entirely likely that we are citing our chat GPT pilot on our articles. 

So what happens when we take those notions and put them together? I think that what we need to do is to hang on to that very broad notion of science because one of the problems with a narrow version of science and thinking is that it has a particular kind of integrity that misses its social context. It misses all the problems that those of us who look at knowledge and think epistemologically know. A broader notion of science reminds us of how complicated this is and helps us to tease out what isn't so straightforward. 

Here are a couple of final thoughts. Firstly, we might need knowledge professionals to help us . One of the most trusted professions across the UK are librarians. We must look after our librarians and archivists because they are our navigators of knowledge, our ‘datanauts.’ They help us understand not just the data on the Excel spreadsheet, but they begin to unpack all of that information about how it got there, how it arrived to us and what the mechanism is of arriving at knowledges. My last point is on meta science. One of the things I find most striking about meta science is that it ought to be a social science informed enterprise but frequently isn't. We need more ‘meta-humanists’ in meta science to land the message that science is something very complex, that is constructed by us, to talk about ourselves. That might then help us understand Research Integrity in all its fullness.