Additionally, he used his prestige to intimidate anyone who might suspect him. This was the case with researchers that had asked for access to unprocessed information from his research. Finally, to keep the manipulated data under control, he did without the help of assistants when it came to collecting information.

These frauds were unmasked thanks to the dedication of three young researchers that denounced him to the university in August. Another three young people had already sounded the alarm previously. Two professors had similar suspicions, but kept quiet. “The committee concluded that the six young accusers showed more courage, vigilance and curiosity than the professors,” said the report. Stapel declared himself guilty in writing. “I am ashamed of this and regret it greatly,” he said.

The chair of the Texas House of Representatives, Joe Straus, is promoting studies at the House’s ethics committee to evaluate whether advisors named by the governor, therein included the members of the boards of regents, should be required to “sign governance documents” prior to accepting the appointments. Most of the six Texas university systems have a specific policy for their regents.

However, the University of Texas, one of the largest, is an exception. Recently, a group of university alumni expressed concern with the possibility of regents embracing controversial proposals put forth by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative organization, given that the governing boards of the two Texan universities have members who also sit on the committees of the said foundation. “There are two types of conflict,” said Gordon Appleman, an attorney and member of the alumni group, to The New York Times daily newspaper: “One is a classic conflict of interests, of a financial nature. The other is cross-participation on boards with conflicting proposals.”

Savage-Rumbaugh with the bonobo Kanzi: forced leave during the investigation

A well-known primate sanctuary in the state of Iowa, the Great Ape Trust, is mired in a crisis.  According to the blog Science Insider in the journal Science, an internal investigation has been launched into accusations that its director, primatologist and psychologist  Susan Savage-Rumbaugh was mistreating the animals.  The sanctuary is home to primates like the bonobo chimpanzee Kanzi, who was taught to communicate by using a symbol keyboard and is able to understand over 3,000 spoken words.  The institution’s management committee placed Savage-Rumbaugh on leave, allowing her only supervised visits to the bonobos.  The  Great Ape Trust was established in 2002 thanks to a US$ 4 million donation from businessman Ted Townsend, as a research center for primate cognition and communications.  The money dried up in 2011 and the committee decided to suspend research activities, but a US$ 50,000 donation allowed work to continue.  Ten months ago, the management committee received the first reports of mistreatment, which it revealed.  In September, employees and former caretakers of the animals took the complaints public.  Savage-Rumbaugh defended herself in a video, telling her accusers, “you don’t know the real situation at the sanctuary,” and proposing that a camera be hung around her neck 24 hours a day, so that she could be monitored.  Ethics specialist Nancy Howell is leading the investigation.

Savage-Rumbaugh with the bonobo Kanzi: forced leave during the investigation

Figel served as commissioner in Brussels between 2004 and 2009 and was responsible for implementation of the Bologna Process, an effort to create a common structure for undergraduate and postgraduate education at European universities. Between 2010 and 2012, he was minister of transportation and deputy prime minister of Slovakia. He obtained his PhD in social service from the St. Elizabeth School of Medicine and Social Service in Bratislava, a private college founded in 2002. The dissertation described the negotiations that led to Slovakia’s admission to the European Union. According to the charge published by the newspaper SME, the text was copied from a book written in partnership with diplomat Miroslav Adamis, who was not given credit in the dissertation. The Ministry of Education will decide whether the PhD is valid and if the school will continue to offer doctoral degrees.

Now, all researchers must inform their institutions of any “significant financial interests” related to them or to members of their families that could have some impact on their professional activities that involve teaching, research, or service on ethics committees. The earlier rule was less comprehensive and required only that a researcher declare interests that were specifically related to the research project in question. The change seeks to prevent situations such as that of Charles Nemeroff, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta. He received more than US$ 800,000 from pharmaceutical multinational GlaxoSmithKline between 2000 and 2006 for giving more than 250 lectures to psychiatrists, but did not disclose those earnings to the university. When discovered and questioned by the university, he argued that the rules were ambiguous and that information about his paid work was not relevant to the institution, since it involved only his experience as a clinician.

Under the new rules, there is no doubt that such financial connections must be declared. The change makes universities responsible for determining whether private financial earnings by their researchers could influence government-financed research projects. There are other changes, too: the value of a source of income that is considered significant (and must therefore be reported) has been reduced from US$10,000 to US$5,000. According to an editorial in the magazine Nature, the U.S. government has reconsidered at least one aspect. According to the original proposal submitted by the NIH, every institution would have to publish on the Internet the information about potential conflicts of interests affecting its researchers, and update the data annually. The version ultimately approved made declaration on the Internet optional; moreover, an institution, if challenged, can defend itself in writing.

“Current issues will be addressed; these issues go beyond research fraud, data manipulation, and plagiarism,” says Sonia Vasconcelos, an expert on this matter and one of the coordinators at this event. Sonia conducts research studies on education and science management at the Medical Biochemistry Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IBqM/UFRJ). “We plan to conduct broad discussions on data protection, changes in project evaluation criteria, the authorship and submitting of science papers, and reviews for science journals, for example.”

Although Brazil has just begun to address this issue and seriously focus on all the related problems, two major steps were taken last year. In September, FAPESP launched the Code of good scientific practices, a set of ethical guidelines for the professional activities that researchers receiving grants and financial aid from the Foundation are involved in. This was a pioneering measure taken by a leading Brazilian funding agency. In October, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) announced the final report prepared by the CNPq’s Scientific Integrity committee with the same objective, and aimed at the country’s research community. “Nowadays, I feel better prepared to answer questions, when I am abroad, about initiatives in this respect in Brazil,” says Sonia. “I tell people that Brazil is leading the debate on scientific integrity in Latin America and that we have official documents containing pedagogical approaches and recommendations for our researchers.”

The event will be attended by participants from abroad, among whom is Nicholas Steneck, of the United States’ University of Michigan, who worked at the Office of Research Integrity for 15 years. The Office of Research Integrity was the first organization in the United States established to deal with research ethics and integrity. Steneck addressed the four principles of research integrity during the second global conference held in Singapore in 2010: 1) honesty in regard to all aspects of research; 2) responsibility while conducting research work; 3) professional courtesy and loyalty to peers; 4) proper management of other researchers’  research work.

Sonia expects the II Brispe to produce recommendations that will have an influence on research activities in Brazil. “I don´t believe the event will be able to deal with all the issues related to scientific integrity, but we can certainly have an in-depth discussion in this respect and help create an approach to these issues by institutions, funding agencies, and publications,” she points out. She emphasizes that Brazil’s scientific endeavors are gaining exposure and possible unethical behavior has to be dealt with seriously. Additional information on II Brispe is available at www.iibrispe.coppe.ufrj.br/.

He arrived at this set of proscribed articles when he researched the Medline database of the United States National Library of Medicine. His next step was to look for the records of these papers in other portals or web repositories. Davis managed to locate versions of 321 of these articles – one out of every five in the sample – lost in virtual libraries or in the archives of universities and departments. Nowhere was there any warning about the fact that the article had been disqualified.

In almost all the cases (95%), the version encountered was that of the scientific journal. Only 4% were versions produced by the author prior to the article being submitted for publication. The place with the largest number of retracted articles was the PubMed Central database, with 43% of the total (138 articles). Ninety-four (or 29%) were found in academic domains, such as laboratory or department websites; and only 10% were in the repository of institutions. He also found 24 articles (4%) in commercial websites. The odd thing is that the articles were being used to promote food supplements or surgical techniques. Records of these articles were found in the Mendeley academic social network and they had been shared, on average, by 3.4 users.

Davis suggested that scientific journals should disseminate warnings about the status of such articles in search and recovery services and that the databases should post retraction notices to the bibliographic references of papers. Another measure would be to inform virtual libraries and online bibliography organization tools about the punishment. Finally, scientific publications should sweep the bibliographic references of all their articles before they are published to avoid having papers that were removed being cited again, said Davis. The study was released by the Journal of the Medical Library Association, of the United States.

One of the suggestions is that institutions publish guidelines and educational materials about scientific integrity and responsible conduct in their research methods on their official websites. It is also suggested that they adopt the use of reference documents for producing these texts. One of them is the Código de boas práticas científicas [Code of good scientific practices], released by FAPESP in September 2011, which is a set of ethical guidelines for the professional activity of researchers who receive grants and support from the Foundation.

Other suggested documents are the Declaration from Singapore on Integrity in Research, a global guide for the responsible conduct of research proposed by the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity and the Research Integrity Guidelines of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

“The recommendations in this joint declaration were made by members of a working group from the second Brispe and discussed before, during and after the session on international policies for integrity in research,” explains Sonia Vasconcelos, one of the event coordinators. The document proposes that institutions include guidelines on scientific integrity in their strategies for promoting research excellence. It also suggests that efforts should be made to inform students, from elementary school to university, that plagiarism in essays, dissertations and theses is an academic breach of conduct and an illegal practice in Brazil.

Also included in the declaration is encouragement for students and teachers to take part in national and international meetings and/or courses on scientific integrity and responsible conduct, and the offer of opportunities for them to develop international linguistic competences for communicating science and their results. Finally, the document suggests activities that disseminate the role of ethics in scientific publications and publishes parameters for stating the authorship of articles in collaborative works.

A report by the Public Accountability Initiative organization emphasized that if Groat had declared his connection, the perception of the results of his study might have been different. The study says that the technique does not contaminate the water table. Groat told the Bloomberg Agency that he had no way of biasing the results since the study has several authors. “Certain conclusions are unfavorable to the gas exploration industry,” he stated.

The university’s code of ethics says that research in the institution must be “free of real or apparent conflicts of personal or institutional interest.” With an annual salary from the University of US$ 173,000, in 2011 Groat received US$ 413,900 in money and shares from the gas exploration company for his services as a board director.

The Federal Government sued BP, the operator of the platform that had exploded. In its defense, BP requested and received more than 50 thousand pages of documents and messages from researchers, with details on how they had estimated the oil spill. The company alleges that the documents are necessary to defend itself in court. The researchers argue that this decision could jeopardize future scientific deliberations (The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 5).

The researchers told The Boston Globe newspaper that the company had allegedly found messages in which the researchers themselves questioned their methods; in addition, the company claimed that the researchers had come up against dead ends or had modified their points of view. According to the two scientists, these events should not have resulted in any questions about their findings, because they are part of scientific work.

The Romanian Government’s National Ethics Council is currently analyzing the case of Ioan Mang, former Minister of Science and Education. Last month, Mang – a computer science specialist – resigned after having been accused of plagiarizing at least eight articles. The most serious event so far involves Prime Minister Victor Ponta, who had been accused of having plagiarized other academic papers – without quoting the sources – in his doctoral thesis in the field of law. He defended his doctoral thesis in 2003. If the charges are confirmed, they could increase the pressure for his resignation.

On June 18, Nature published an article on this episode, after having gained access to documents attesting that more than half of Ponta’s doctoral thesis consisted of published – albeit unidentified – academic texts. The thesis was re-published in the form of a book in 2004 and used as reference for another book, published in 2010, on international humanitarian laws. Substantial excerpts from the three publications seem to be very similar to articles published in Rumanian by legal scholars Dumitru Diaconu and Vasile Creţu, and in English by Ion Diaconu. “The evidence of plagiarism is devastating,” said Marius Andruh, a chemist from the University of Bucharest, in an interview to Nature. Andruh is the chairman of the Romanian board that validates academic titles.

On June 21, Nature published a letter forwarded by the Romanian Government’s press publicist, denying the accusations of plagiarism. In the letter, Victor Ponta states his willingness to submit his work to “any kind of analysis.” According to Great Britain’s newspaper The Guardian (June 19), the prime minister accused his political rival – Romania’s President Traian Basescu – of orchestrating the attack against him.

Ponta worked on his doctoral thesis at the University of Bucharest when he was State Secretary during the administration of Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, who had also been Ponta’s doctoral advisor. He became prime minister in May of this year, after his predecessor, Emil Boc, resigned from office.

Actually, the issue of the adverse effects of global warming was politically sensitive, given the resistance of the George W. Bush administration to take any measures to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases. That very same year, another US agency, Nasa, was involved in a similar case of censorship. An employee from the public relations sector was accused of trying to restrict access by journalists to James Hansen, the US space agency’s main expert on climate change. At the time, Hansen stated that the censorship campaign had begun after a speech by him in which he had asked for fast reduction of the gases that cause global warming. According to the blog “Careers,” in the journal Science, the Noaa  policy of integrity states that the agency’s scientists “may freely talk to the media and to the public about scientific and technical discoveries based on their official work.” Moreover, it adds that they are “free to put forth points of view, for example, about political and management issues that extend beyond their scientific discoveries, incorporating personal and specialized opinions.” This is the case provided they make it clear that they are not talking on behalf of the agency. “Under no circumstances may a Noaa authority request that scientists suppress or change their scientific discoveries.”

The Noaa document determines that the body’s decisions are to be taken based on the “best possible science.” It establishes rules regarding the statement of conflict of interests and creates the means of protecting those who inform, in good faith, about poor scientific conduct as well as those researchers that are judged innocent in an investigation process.

In the first case, the researcher included in his funding proposal passages from an unpublished manuscript without identifying the true author; this is plagiarism. However, what is more serious is that the author was his superior and had given him the unpublished manuscript for revision, which in the assessment of the Joint Investigation Committee, which was accepted by the DFG, represents breach of trust as well as plagiarism. However, it is worth noting that, as far as the committee was concerned, the superior of the punished researcher also acted improperly by delegating the review of his original texts to a subordinate. Hence the expectation, according to Dorothee Dzwonnek, general secretary of the German Research Foundation, that the university where the two researchers work should undertake its own investigation into these acts of scientific misconduct.

The second case, concerning a sponsorship proposal submitted to the DFG, also involved the use of third-party materials without citing the source.

The target of the accusation was Craig Grimes, who until 2010 was a professor of electrical engineering at Pennsylvania State University. In January, he pleaded guilty to charges that included simultaneously receiving grants from the Department of Energy (DOE) and from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to finance the same research on solar conversion of carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons. Although it is fine to request funding from two different agencies for the same project, to actually receive funds and use them is illegal, said Christine Boez, former NSF auditor, to Nature. Duplicate funding is prohibited in many countries, but according to her, there is no way to know how widespread the problem is. Cases only tend to become known if the controllers detect similarities in proposals for grants submitted to the agencies.

Grimes got a grant from the NSF for his research in 2009 and, later on, in the same year, got a second grant from the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (Arpa-E), claiming that he had no other source of funding. The university asked Grimes why the grants were so similar, but he assured the institution that there was no overlapping. However, in a paper in 2010, he admitted that the two agencies had financed the same work. It was at this point that the DOE’s auditor discovered the problem; the NSF began its investigation and Grimes lost his post at the university. The accusations against the researcher also include undue appropriation of funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to test a blood detector on newborn babies, but this case is still at the investigation stage.

“Institutions and journals have a duty to fight misconduct,” says Elizabeth Wagner, Chair of COPE. “It’s important that we communicate and collaborate effectively,” she says. The idea corroborates the ‘Code of good scientific practices’ introduced by FAPESP in 2011, according to which the bulk of responsibility for integrity lies with the institutions, even though periodicals are co-responsible within the limits of their operation.

In the case of journals, it is recommended that they have clear policies for dealing with suspicious cases and are ready to respond to questioning from institutions and other organizations charged with carrying out investigations. Institutions, on the other hand, must encourage their researchers to inform journals if mistakes are discovered in published works. They must also offer training on good practice in their education programs on scientific integrity.

Although it has been studying rules for investigating suspicions, the document emphasizes that the task of educating researchers, promoting good practices and creating prevention strategies are equally important. “Ideally, the policies of journals and institutions must cover all of these aspects,” the document emphasizes. The text recognizes that other players, principally the funding agencies, have an important role to play in promoting scientific integrity and that they must be informed about cases of misconduct in the projects that they sponsor. “We hope the directives help the financing institutions to develop their scientific integrity policies, in collaboration with researchers and editors.”

Investigation into the work of the Indian scientist began in 2009 after the Office of Research Integrity, a federal health research integrity supervisory body, advised UConn about a complaint involving an article published by Das’ laboratory. The problems refer more specifically to manipulation of experiments with tests called western blots, which indicate the presence and quantity of certain proteins in the blood. The relationship between wine and health benefits is the object of study worldwide, with varied results.

The investigation at UConn produced a report running to 60,000 pages into 145 accusations of falsification of information published in 23 articles. Other researchers who worked with Das may be accused of bad conduct. He denies the accusations, says that scientists from other institutions reached the same conclusions as he did, and complains of discrimination because he is Indian. In addition to the investigation at UConn, the Office of Research Integrity has opened their own enquiry into the case.

To try and improve the commitment of researchers from the medical area to good practice in science, the group that represents higher education teaching institutions in the UK, Universities UK (UUK), is preparing a document on the integrity of research. The objective is to promote the integrity of investigation  and make clear the responsibilities of institutions, development organisms and researchers, in addition to supplying examples of good practice. The document is being prepared together with funding agencies and should be ready in April.

Concern grew after a survey by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which was publicized in January during a congress in London, showed that the British scientific community has failed to deal with bad conduct in medical research. The BMJ interviewed 2782 doctors and academics and found that 13% of them indicated that they knew of cases where data had been altered or fabricated deliberately by researchers. A further 6% stated that they knew of bad conduct occurring in their institutions that had not been duly investigated.

According to the journal Nature, participants at the meeting asked for more energetic action to be taken. “This acknowledges that we have a problem,” said Fiona Godlee, chief editor of the BMJ. The question is not a new one for the British. Last year, a British parliamentary science and technology committee concluded that the “integrity of research in the UK is unsatisfactory.” In 2000, The Lancet, another important medical science journal, criticized errors of conduct and regretted that nothing was being done.

The final communiqué from the congress recommended reinforcement of the mechanisms that should guarantee good conduct in research. In the UK, there is no official national body with legal or regulatory powers that deals with ethical problems in research. The closest to this is the UK Integrity Research Office, a private organization that provides consultancy services and guidance on questions relating to research integrity. It is supported by government bodies, development agencies, universities and private institutions involved in research.

The story that is now being told in detail by the journalist Brian Deer, who investigated the case of the MMR vaccine for seven years and gained access to the medical records of those who took part in the study, exposes yet again the frailties of a knowledge production system that, despite some self-correcting capabilities, is not infallible. “Brian Deer’s series of articles illustrates many of the ways in which science may be corrupt,” wrote Douglas Opel and Douglas Diekema, from the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and Edgar Marcuse, from the Seattle Children’s Hospital, in an editorial dated January 18, in the BMJ. “Above all, Deer shows that the mechanisms that are meant to ensure the integrity of research failed completely.”

The work that would turn out to be the result of data manipulation, omissions of responsibility and ethical deviations started to disseminate fear of the MMR vaccine (against measles, mumps and rubella) 13 years ago. In its February 18, 1998 edition, The Lancet, one of the world’s most influential medical journals, aired the apparently alarming results of a study conducted by the gastric surgeon Andrew Wakefield. In this article, he and another 12 authors narrated that one week after being given the vaccine, 12 children in England started showing gastrointestinal disorders along with impairment of their mental development akin to that of autism.

At the time, Wakefield stated that the symptoms of the children characterized a new syndrome, which he named regressive autism, because it arose after a phase of normal development. Although the article in The Lancet stated that “we have not proven the association between the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella and the syndrome described,” Wakefield undertook to confirm the connection. With the support of the institution that he worked for, the Royal Free Hospital in London, he prepared a press conference and distributed a video to TV networks in which he championed the link between the vaccine and autism.

“The main reason for the press conference was not the possible connection between the intestinal and developmental disorders – it was Wakefield’s supposition that the MMR vaccine, used in the United States since the early 1970′s and in Great Britain since a decade before that, might be the element responsible for the dramatic increase in autism rates,” explains the journalist Seth Mnookin in the book The panic virus: a true story about medicine, science, and fear. Mnookin states, in his work released this year, that Wakefield stuck to his statement of having found the measles virus – something denied by other studies – in the intestinal tract of children with irritable bowel syndrome, to show a possible biological pathway connecting the vaccination to the intestinal disorder and to autism.

Although experts questioned the data at the time, the damage was done. Fear that the vaccine might cause autism spread through several countries with the help of anti-vaccination support groups and the careless work of the press. Result: the ratio of vaccinated children dropped to 80% in Great Britain in 2003, well below the 95% recommended by the World Health Organization, so that in 2008 measles once again became an endemic disease in England and in Wales.

Investigating the case, Brain Deer managed to get, in 2004, the first indications of fraud in Wakefield’s work, which he published in the newspaper The Sunday Times. As a result, the British General Medical Council opened proceedings against Wakefield and the other authors, which made it possible to reconstruct the farce.

Deer obtained proof that Wakefield had acted deliberately the whole time. The cases described in the article concerned children whose parents believed that their offspring had developed autism after vaccination, but had not received a medical diagnosis. They had been referred to Wakefield by an anti-vaccination association, Justice Awareness and Basic Support, whereas the correct procedure would have been to look for cases using a random population sample as the starting point or to receive patients referred by other medical centers. The surgeon also received payment from the lawyer Richard Barr, who was looking for evidence to sue the vaccine manufacturers.

According to these articles, Wakefield was not against vaccinating children in general, only against the MMR vaccine, since he had taken out a patent for a measles vaccine. “With no evidence, Wakefield stated for years that throughout the world, physicians, along with public health authorities, not only knew that the vaccines caused children terrible problems, but concealed this information for their own benefit,” Deer told Pesquisa FAPESP.

Retracted article
Although the medical council ruled on the ethical suitability of Wakefield’s research, it was Deer that showed that the clinical symptoms presented in the article in The Lancet did not correspond to those described by the children’s parents. Despite the evidence of fraud, it was only after the ruling of the council, which revoked Wakefield’s medical license in 2010, that The Lancet cancelled the 1998 article – it can still be read online, but it exhibits in red the word “retracted.”

Although the case was concluded, certain concerns remain in the air, given that similar problems may be more common than one might imagine. One such concern is: What drives people to manipulate research results? The physician William Saad Hossne, head of the National Research Ethics Committee (Conep) in Brazil from 1996 to 2007 and coordinator of the development of the rules of clinical research in the country, believes that the reasons are manifold. “The number of researchers is increasing exponentially; competition is increasingly strong and there is a search for recognition. Moreover, the projects are more complex and involve more people,” he states.

“Nowadays, the researcher must be productive, which fosters a more flexible research culture,” says Sueli Dallari, who teaches at the School of Public Health at the University of São Paulo (USP). “In studies with humans, when they record the data, researchers are often less strict than they should be,” states the researcher, who used to be a member of Conep and sat on the research ethics commission of USP’s Clinicas Hospital.

Concern about fraud, according to Hossne, led countries such as the United States, Germany and Denmark to establish, in recent decades, institutions that aim to guarantee the integrity of research. In Brazil, Conep, established in 1990, regulates, approves and monitors trials involving humans. Conep’s resolutions 196 and 251, for example, determine that research data must be stored and remain available for consultation for at least five years. “The fact that someone might ask to examine the data helps to control quality,” says Hossne.

According to Sueli, to improve this control further, it would be necessary to have ethics commissions able to monitor the execution of the projects. “As the number is large,” she says, “one might check on a few to see whether they actually did what they set out to do and in the way in which they set out to do it.”