Daniel BuenoResearchers from Ireland will be required to open their lab notes to external auditors and show them how they prevent cases of misconduct, according to a strategy proposed by the leasing research-sponsoring agency in Ireland. Mark Ferguson, director of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), asked independent consulting firms to carry out an unusual audit. The firms that were hired will check whether institutions that receive SFI funding, including the main universities in Ireland, have adequate procedures for reporting and investigating cases of scientific misconduct, in addition to determining whether managers have followed these procedures in specific situations and whether the investigations were carried out satisfactorily.
Some projects that the agency has funded, selected at random, will be analyzed in greater detail. The auditors will evaluate how experimental data was annotated and analyzed and they may check information used to support the papers of these groups. “I don’t want to cast us in the role of Big Brother. I want this to be constructive, polite and educative,” Ferguson told the journal Nature. “The idea is to find mistakes and promulgate best practices. We are all in the business of making sure we are getting the best research for our money.”
Some members of the Irish scientific community had reservations about this announcement. For example, they doubt that the auditors have sufficient scientific knowledge to evaluate something that transcends the merely formal aspects of research. For John Ioannidis, Professor of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University, there is the risk that the checks may be superficial. “It is an interesting idea, but I doubt that the sample of projects audited will be enough to make any difference,” he told Nature.
A few days before the announcement, the National Policy Statement on Ensuring Research Integrity in Ireland was issued and signed by Ireland’s key research institutions and research-sponsoring agencies, which follow guidelines similar to those adopted by the European Union. The document lists four commitments. The first is the promotion of high standards of integrity at every stage of research. The second deals with education and proposes promoting a culture of integrity in the academic environment to bolster the training of future researchers. The third establishes the engagement of all the signatory institutions to work in a coordinated manner to promote good practices. The last one adopts fair and transparent processes to deal with allegations of misconduct. These four commitments are included in the FAPESP Code of Best Scientific Practices, introduced in 2011.
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