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An Ethics of the System: Talking to Scientists About Research Integrity

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Abstract

Research integrity and misconduct have recently risen to public attention as policy issues. Concern has arisen about divergence between this policy discourse and the language and concerns of scientists. This interview study, carried out in Denmark with a cohort of highly internationalised natural scientists, explores how researchers talk about integrity and good science. It finds, first, that these scientists were largely unaware of the Danish Code of Conduct for Responsible Conduct of Research and indifferent towards the value of such codes; second, that they presented an image of good science as nuanced and thereby as difficult to manage through abstracted, principle-based codes; and third, that they repeatedly pointed to systemic issues both as triggering misconduct and as ethical problems in and of themselves. Research integrity is framed as a part of wider moves to ‘responsibilise’ science; understood in these terms, resistance to codes of conduct and the representation of integrity as a problem of science as a whole can be seen as a rejection of a neoliberal individualisation of responsibility.

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Notes

  1. ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, has most prominently developed a European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (updated in 2017) that has been adopted by the European Commission and has shaped Codes developed within specific national contexts. See http://www.allea.org/publications/joint-publications/european-code-conduct-research-integrity/.

  2. The Office of Research Integrity: see https://ori.hhs.gov. As Resnik (2003) explains, ORI was a key actor in producing early definitions of misconduct.

  3. See the most recent call at the time of writing, for projects that develop “research integrity standard operating procedures”: http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/opportunities/h2020/topics/swafs-03-2018.html. Recently funded projects include PRINTEGER (Promoting Integrity as an Integral Dimension of Excellence in Research) and ENERI (European Network of Research Ethics and Research Integrity).

  4. For similar approaches within science and technology studies, see Davies (2011), Irwin (2006) and Kearnes et al. (2014).

  5. In line with practice in science and technology studies research, the aim behind sampling was to engage individuals representing a range of experiences and perspectives rather than attempting to reach a representative population (see Kearnes et al 2014; Law 2004).

  6. See https://dff.dk/en/application/after-having-received-a-grant.

  7. All names have been changed. In these empirical sections illustrative quotes are given to explain my arguments; these are, however, representative of widely repeated themes that occur throughout the data.

  8. This argument had particular traction for those who had spent some years in the Danish context. Denmark has had, since 2010, a long-running and extremely high profile fraud case involving the University of Copenhagen neuroscientist Milena Penkowa. Efforts towards research integrity are almost invariably framed, by those familiar with the case, as a response to Penkowa; in this context the Danish Code is presented as a way for the universities and funders to ‘cover their backs’ should such a case occur again.

  9. I do not want to comment here on whether such intervention is positive or negative: this analysis is descriptive rather than normative and I am thus defending neither a vision of self-governing science nor one of socially responsive research.

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  1. Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Sarah R. Davies

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  1. Sarah R. Davies
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Correspondence to Sarah R. Davies.

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Davies, S.R. An Ethics of the System: Talking to Scientists About Research Integrity. Sci Eng Ethics 25, 1235–1253 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-018-0064-y

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