COMMENTARY

 

Research ethics and integrity challenges require innovative approaches

 

 

Dorsamy (Gansen) Pillay^I; Molapo Qhobela^II

^IDeputy CEO for Research and Innovation Support and Advancement, National Research Foundation, Pretoria, South Africa
^IIChief Executive Officer: National Research Foundation, Pretoria, South Africa

Correspondence

 

 

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Keywords: World Conference on Research Integrity, research ethics, research funding, publication output, questionable publishing

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Our world is growing. The number of researchers and academics is increasing. The pressure for these researchers and academics, and indeed their institutions, to publish more is ongoing. Consequently, the number of research publications in both journals and books is on an exponential upward trajectory. Coupled with this positive trend is the challenge facing all countries, both developed and developing, to uphold the ethics of research and advance research integrity. However, this task is no longer simple and requires innovative, collaborative and coordinated approaches to ensure the integrity of the research enterprise. Research integrity may be viewed as active adherence to the ethical principles and professional standards essential for the responsible practice of research.

The objective of the World Conferences on Research Integrity (WCRIs) is to foster integrity in research. The first WCRI was held in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2007. Six WCRIs later, participation has grown from 275 participants from 47 countries in 2007 in Lisbon to 701 participants from more than 50 countries at the 6th WCRI held in 2019 in Hong Kong. The majority of participants were from Asia and Europe, with only 24 participants from Africa. South Africa has been afforded the privilege of hosting the 7th WCRI in Cape Town in 2021 - the first time that a WCRI will be held on the African continent. The WCRIs have produced two global statements on research integrity, namely the Singapore Statement in 2010^1,2, of which the National Research Foundation (NRF) is a signatory, and the Montreal Statement in 2013^3,4. In fact, the NRF translated the Singapore Statement into eight of South Africa's official languages to ensure wider dissemination of the statement.

According to the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity, the value and benefits of research are vitally dependent on the integrity of research. While there can be and are national and disciplinary differences in the way research is organised and conducted, there are also principles and professional responsibilities that are fundamental to the integrity of research wherever it is undertaken. The Montreal Statement on Research Integrity in Cross‐Boundary Research Collaborations emphasises that research collaborations that cross national, institutional, disciplinary, and sector boundaries are important to the advancement of knowledge worldwide. This is particularly important to the NRF whose mandate includes research collaboration across national, regional and international borders.

The STM Report⁵ estimates that there are approximately 10 000 journal publishers globally, of which around 5000 are included in the Scopus database. The main English-language trade and professional associations for journal publishers collectively comprise about 650 publishers that produce about 11 550 journals. There were about 33 100 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals in mid-2018 (plus a further 9400 non-English-language journals), collectively publishing over 3 million articles a year. The increase in publications may be attributed to the growth in R&D expenditure, the inherent international competition among researchers, institutions and countries with respect to knowledge production worldwide and the increasing number of researchers, which now stands at between 7 and 8 million. China surpassed the USA in 2017 to become the pre-eminent producer of research papers globally, with a share of about 19%.⁵

The research publication output trend is no different in South Africa where a recent study commissioned by the NRF on the State of the South African Research Enterprise⁶ showed an increase in absolute numbers of publications and a doubling of world share over the past 15 years. However, the exceptional research performance in terms of increases in scientific publication should be moderated against the background of growing concerns about increased examples of unethical and questionable publication practices, including predatory publishing, indiscriminate publication strategies and growing evidence of gaming the publishing system.^6,7

In a recent report to the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), Mouton et al.⁸ noted that predatory publishing in South Africa - at least in subsidy-earning journals - has decreased over the past 2 years. This decrease may be attributed to the high saliency of the issue, together with the interventions taken by the DHET, NRF and individual universities that have forced academics to rethink their publication strategies. However, this does not suggest that academics have stopped publishing in predatory journals. Studies from other countries in the world where academics do not benefit financially from publications suggest that predatory publishing remains a major challenge.⁸

According to the same report⁸, other forms of questionable publication practices that remain common in the South African higher education system include (1) excessive publication of papers by editors in their 'own' journals; (2) excessive publication of papers by members of the editorial boards of certain journals; and (3) excessive submission of conference proceedings for subsidy by certain individual academics. All of these practices constitute unacceptable gaming of the DHET subsidy system and require firm and swift action on the part of the DHET to sanction and hence prevent such practices from continuing.

Factors that may have contributed to the current state of affairs include (1) a culture of performance management that pervades every aspect of the academic culture; (2) an incentive and reward system that has produced unintended consequences; and (3) new opportunities for fraudulent and unethical practices emerging from the digital and open access movements.⁸

In a recent editorial in Nature⁹, it was emphasised that research integrity is about creating systems that boost the quality, relevance and reliability of all research, better record-keeping, vetting experimental designs, techniques to reduce bias, rewards for rigorous work, and incentives for sharing data, code and protocols. It is different from research misconduct that encompasses fraud, fabrication and plagiarism. According to the editorial, the conflation of integrity and misconduct is problematic because it stops researchers from talking about ways to improve their work. The NRF is of the view that conducting research with integrity, honesty and accuracy must be acknowledged, upheld and sustained.

As South Africa's premier research funding agency, the NRF awards research grants to researchers at universities, science councils and the national research facilities based on peer review. The NRF also evaluates and rates its researchers based on their scholarship and research productivity over a period of time. As a result of its position, the NRF found it appropriate to spearhead the formulation of a joint Statement on Ethical Research and Scholarly Publishing Practices¹⁰ that sets out a national position on the issue of research ethics and scholarly publishing (the Statement is also published in this issue of SAJS). The statement consists of 12 principles and is in alignment with the deliberations of the WCRIs. Adherence to these principles by researchers applying to the NRF are not negotiable. Adherence is effected through communications to institutions and the online application systems, and is monitored during the review processes.

The above constitutes a battery of NRF initiatives to ensure adherence to ethical scholarly research and publishing practices. These include, inter alia, the NRF's contribution to the Global Research Council's Principles on Peer Review; the issue of an NRF Statement on Predatory Publishing; and the issue of an NRF Statement on Open Access.

One of the objectives of the 6th WCRI in Hong Kong in 2019 was to contribute to reforming the way in which researchers are assessed.^11,12 A draft of the Hong Kong Manifesto for Assessing Researchers: Fostering Research Integrity was developed and discussed at the conference and the third draft posted for comment on the conference website. The closing date for comments was 13 September 2019. The manifesto suggests that the current approach to research assessment by institutions is inadequate at best and creates perverse incentives for poor research conduct at worst. The approach involves counting publications without real quality assessment beyond simply using (rather indiscriminately) the journal impact factor or H-index and adding up an individual's grant income. The manifesto suggests six principles, which might form the basis of a new more comprehensive way of assessing researchers with a special focus on strengthening and rewarding research integrity. The principles include: societal need as a goal for research; responsible indicators that broadly reflect the contribution to the research enterprise; the need to publish or report all research completely and transparently; a culture of open research; the differentiated recognition of different research types, such as exploratory research and replication; and the inclusion of other contributions to the research enterprise, such as peer review and improving the research environment. It is hoped that once the finalised version of the manifesto is endorsed by participating countries, it will be adopted for implementation.

At the 6th WCRI in Hong Kong, Australia's Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel, in his presentation on 'Actions to Advance Research Integrity', focused on the practical aspects in the firm conviction that the research community has a system that is fundamentally sound, but that can undoubtedly be improved through several interventions.^13,14

Based on the aforementioned and given South Africa's own experiences, the following approaches may be considered by the NRF, in collaboration with its stakeholders and the international community, in fostering research integrity:

•Develop, in collaboration with other key role players in the research system of South Africa, a National Research Integrity Policy and Guideline, for implementation by all research entities.

•Explore the development of an online 'Research Integrity' module that is free and easily accessible to all researchers and graduate students.

•Ensure that capacities and structures for ensuring the quality assurance of research and ethical clearances exist at all NRF-funded institutions.

•Ensure that mentors are available to guide emerging researchers in respect of grant proposal writing, publications writing and optimising networking opportunities.

•Make proof of research integrity training a requirement for applying for an NRF research grant, postgraduate scholarship or NRF rating. In the case of research grants, proof of research integrity training should be applicable to all investigators listed on the application.

•Continue to request the researchers' best five publications from them when they apply for an NRF rating. This criterion should be extended to all research grant applications.

•Consider new publications only from those journals that have proven their compliance with the Publication Process Quality Assurance (PPQA), as advanced by Finkel¹⁴.

It is hoped that the above measures will add impetus to upholding research integrity in the country. Globally, interest in research integrity and publication ethics continues to be critically important. There is growing awareness of the need to sustain ethical research practices and to avoid any form of misconduct. This is evident from the work of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The number of journal article retractions has grown substantially in the last decade. There are now more than 20 000 retracted papers in the Retraction Watch database. All these developments augur well for the future. However, as a research community, we cannot afford to become complacent.

 

References

1.Singapore Statement on Research Integrity [document on the Internet]. c2010 [cited 2019 Oct 16]. Available from: https://wcrif.org/documents/327-singapore-statement-a4size/file        [ Links ]

2.Steneck NH, Mayer T, Anderson MS, Kleinert S. The origin, objectives, and evolution of the World Conferences on Research Integrity. In: Gundersen LC, editor. Scientific integrity and ethics in the geosciences. Washington DC: American Geophysical Union; 2017. p. 3-14. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119067825.ch1        [ Links ]

3.Montreal Statement on Research Integrity in Cross‐Boundary Research Collaborations [document on the Internet]. c2013 [cited 2019 Oct 16]. Available from: https://wcrif.org/documents/354-montreal-statement-english/file        [ Links ]

4.Anderson MS. Shifting perspectives on research integrity - early history [webpage on the Internet]. No date [cited 2019 Oct 16]. Available from: https://wcrif.org/conferences/early-history/articles/origin-and-objectives        [ Links ]

5.Johnson R, Watkinson A, Mabe M. The STM report. An overview of scientific and scholarly publishing. 5th ed. The Hague: International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers; 2018.         [ Links ]

6.Mouton J, Basson I, Blanckenberg J, Boshoff N, Prozesky H, Redelinghuys H, et al. The state of the South African research enterprise. Stellenbosch: DST-NRF Centre of Excellence on Scientometrics and STI Policy, Stellenbosch University; 2019. Available from: http://www0.sun.ac.za/scistip/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/state-of-the-South-African-research-enterprise.pdf        [ Links ]

7.Mouton J, Valentine A. The extent of South African authored articles in predatory journals. S Afr J Sci. 2017;113(7-8), Art. #2017-0010, 9 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2017/20170010        [ Links ]

8.Mouton J, et al. The quality of South Africa's research publications. Unpublished report to the Department of Higher Education and Training; 2019.         [ Links ]

9.Editorial: Research integrity is much more than misconduct. Nature. 2019;570(5). https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01727-0        [ Links ]

10.Statement on Ethical Research and Scholarly Publishing Practices. c2019 [cited 2019 Oct 16]. Available from: https://www.nrf.ac.za/media-room/news/statement-ethical-research-and-scholarly-publishing-practices        [ Links ]

11.Kleinert S. Editorial: Assessing researchers with a focus on research integrity. The Lancet. 2019;393(10181):1570.         [ Links ]

12.Moher D, Bouter L, Kleinert S, Glasziou P, Sham MH. The Hong Kong Manifesto for Assessing Researchers: Fostering Research Integrity. Presented at: 6th WCRI; 2019 June 2-5; Hong Kong. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/m9abx        [ Links ]

13.Finkel A. To move research from quantity to quality, go beyond good intentions. Nature. 2019;566:297. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00613-z        [ Links ]

14.Finkel A. Actions to advance research integrity. Presented at: 6th WCRI; 2019 June 2-5; Hong Kong.         [ Links ]

 

 

Correspondence:
Gansen Pillay
gansen.pillay@nrf.ac.za

Published: 27 November 2019