FST JOURNAL

The incentives and rewards for finding positive and publishing results are now so strong, that people will push the limits to get published. Researchers are under ever increasing pressure to get published and incentives inevitably shape behaviour. 

One of the things that is happening in the UK that is helping us with this problem is an increasing push to publish negative or null results and a changing census across universities that those results are also valid. Alternative methods for publication of research are also becoming more accepted and enable the broader spectrum of science to have a platform. Research that may not be accepted in traditional avenues, can indeed be published.

We need to try and recreate why people enter science and research, ie: to push the boundaries of knowledge rather than just to publish papers. It is the duty of those further on in their careers to educate the younger generation about this.

Is there an appetite for a version of the hypocritic oath for researchers? One panelist said the time it would take to decide on exactly what researchers should sign up to may discourage the community from setting something like this up. However, a declaration tailored to each particular discipline might be a more customary and useful way to approach the idea.

One panellist said that common challenges for professionals that lead to barriers for submitting rigorous research was time and resource. This challenge is one catalyst for issues around Research Integrity, particularly in other countries. However, the UK is in a good position when it comes to rates of retraction of scientific articles.

It was later noted that there is a named owner of Research Integrity in each UK Government department who is responsible for how evidence is used by scientific advisors. 

There is enormous strain on the peer review pool that we have. Trying to get a peer reviewer with adequate skills, experience and time to do the work, can take a long time and many applications. Publishers can help make the process of peer review more efficient and easier for those taking part with the aim to increase participation. What publishers are focusing on now is what the experience of the peer reviewer should be. 

Science by nature matures and changes and we need to take this into account. Reproducibility and replicability are really important concepts, but they are not sacred cows and we shouldn’t treat them as such. We need to take a step back in our interpretation of reproducibility and replicability of research, and be a little more nuance and subtle in how we talk about it. We could take some perspective from the humanities in how we do so.

What is the connection between research ethics and integrity? One panellist said that research ethics is a subset of integrity. Research ethics should be thought of as a way of thinking about how to do things in the right way, rather than a process that we are getting through. 

When it comes to issues around ‘group think’ within the scientific community and the effect of this on research and results,   we’ve got to learn as scientists is that actually what we are doing is constructed within a social framework and therefore we do adopt the group think of our community and it can take time for this paradigm to change. It was noted that a contributing factor to group think in science is that often communities are self-selecting and monolithic, and not sufficiently diverse. A diverse community often produces better research.

Is Research Integrity ready for Artificial Intelligence (AI)? One panellist said that there is a lot of activity going on, including the publication of guidelines but that honestly, the joining up of thinking is not yet there. They said that the honest answer would be that the Research Integrity community is not yet ready for AI. Another panellist gave a final word from a publishing perspective. She said that two years ago, publishers were not ‘match fit’ for the fast developments in AI and digital misconduct. They had trouble identifying fraudulent papers and issues associated with new technologies. However, over the last few years, publishers have had to tread the line carefully between taking advance of the opportunities that some new technologies provide, and also thinking very carefully about the downsides, threats and the way that some of these technologies are applied. What this has allowed is proper thought on policies around Generative AI, ie: authors can use certain Generative AI tools, but generally, editors and reviewers cannot. This has also lead to careful thinking around the tools for both submitted manuscripts and published papers within the historic arena. Her final thought was that publishers were some way to being ready for the new ‘industrial revolution’ of AI.