Last edited Tue Feb 13, 2024, 05:35 AM - Edit history (1)
https://www.nature.com/articles/494149a.pdf
The key to protecting science, therefore, is to strengthen self-correction. Publication, peer-review and misconduct investigations should focus less on what scientists do, and more on what they communicate.
What is wrong with current approaches? By
defining misconduct in terms of behaviours, as
all countries do at present, we have to rely on
whistle-blowers to discover it, unless the fabrication is so obvious as to be apparent from papers.
It is rare for misconduct to have witnesses; and
surveys suggest that when people do know about a colleagues’ misbehaviour, they rarely report it. Investigators, then, face the arduous task of reconstructing what a scientist did, establishing that the behaviour deviated from accepted practices and determining whether such deviation expressed an intention to deceive. Only the most clear-cut cases are ever exposed.
I use it as a guideline for a paper I am currently working on as a follow-up to work I published a decade ago. I started this paper in the August of 2009 building a theoretical model for a paper I had just published.
There was never any misconduct in my published work/data submitted for grants or data presented at meetings by the common definitions of misconduct-i.e. no falsification/fabrication or plagiarism.
On the other hand was it work of a quality I would consider acceptable today? Definitely not in some cases. As I matured as a scientist I recognised more and more how subpar my work and even way of thinking about science are.
Explicitly speaking, the main issue I have with my old work is that I was a shirker where it came to instrument calibration.
I will have to see if peer reviewers and my former coauthors accept my explanation that the instrument I used was stable enough that neglecting to calibrate it with each experiment would not have caused errors of an order of magnitude such as to invalidate my results. Otoh it was definitely an unforgivably sloppy way of doing any experiment and I certainly don’t condone it.
I was always in such disarray that I was perpetually running behind on everything. I had some striking results that are still fine, but not having calibrated the instrument with every single experiment definitely worries me still.
I started the follow up research to understand the problem better shortly after publishing my main paper and thankfully this year I will finally be able to complete it and send it out.
At least the follow up work I have done is respectable enough that I am moderately happy with it.
I don’t get people like Diederich Stapel-what pleasure can there be in publishing bullshit?
I will definitely explicitly be saying in the follow up paper “the calibration curve is from this/this or this date. The instrument was not calibrated with every single experiment.”
I am posting this here because I think it is important that the general public have faith in publically funded scientific research because it is one of the few reliable things left in society.
The wrong way to go about doing open science (though very lucrative to surveillance capitalists) is this:
https://newrepublic.com/article/178268/surveillance-changing-intimate-relationships
If your scientists need to be monitored all the time to do the right thing your system is broken anyway.
Where I do disagree with Fanelli is the part where he says that scientists are not more honest than the general public. That could be so in lucrative industrial sciences. In my personal experience, the honesty of my colleagues has always been a big part of the reason I have striven to improve myself.
Most scientists I know even slightly are quite honest (I worked in academic science from around June 2001-July 2011..well technically June 2001 to April 2012, but I was burnt out and malfunctioning between Sept 2011 and April 2012). Then again they are all in the natural sciences and none of them really have any ties to industry, politics etc.
People get cynical with no one to look up to and that was definitely not the case with my colleagues or mentors. Otoh keeping up with them was always hard…Science is not for the faint hearted unless you have natural aptitude and or an excellent education. I doubt I have the natural aptitude part. But my education was decent enough once I went into the natural sciences (which again I did too late in life). I was originally an engineer-a boring and uninspiring field.
I will feel better once I submit this paper, because I consider it a basic obligation I have to publically funded science.
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