Recent Questions in Responsible Conduct of Research

The global research enterprise has seen extensive technological, social, and financial changes in the last two decades that have dramatically changed the face of academic research. While many of these changes have had a tremendously positive impact on research progress, many of them have raised new questions about how to ensure that research is conducted responsibly. In addition, there have been some high-profile cases of error and fabrication in published works that might have been caught earlier if the enterprise had better safeguards in place. There is an ongoing discussion within the research enterprise about whether and how to establish new guidelines to ensure the integrity of the research process within this shifting environment. In this article, I survey key changes in the research environment that have opened up new questions about how to best ensure the integrity of the research process. Introduction The U.S. academic research community was forced to address issues relating to the responsible conduct of research (RCR) in the late 1980s in response to numerous allegations of falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism (FFP) in federally funded research projects (Wheeler 1991). The first document to formally address issues of RCR, give guidelines defining research misconduct, and provide recommendations for how to establish institutional practices protecting against falsification of the research record was the 1992 report Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process published by the National Academies (NAS 1992). The report defined FFP as research misconduct; it also identified a collection of questionable research practices, such as the inappropriate use of statistical methods, which must be avoided to protect the research record, but these practices do not rise to the level of misconduct. The 1992 report addressed a wide range of issues in RCR, ranging from FFP, to data and record storage, to treatment of subordinates. While all of these issues and associated recommendations are still applicable today, the research enterprise has seen important social, technological, and financial changes during the last two decades that raise important new questions in the RCR realm.