Getting what you pay for?: The ethics of selective publication

Abstract

0 d icts between the norms of science and those of politics and overnance. However, the difficulties they point to are quite eneral in contemporary research in applied science. This has een noted especially in the extended debate over pharmaeutical company sponsorship in medical research. Progress n overcoming this kind of conflict can only be made by estabishing strong norms of publicity in scientific research, and trong institutional mechanisms for promoting and enforcing hese norms. However, in the current funding climate, uniersities and research centres have incentives not to adhere igorously to these norms. The scientific community as a hole must therefore take active steps to resist the sort of elective publication described by Miller, Moore and Strang n the general public interest. The increasing dominance within universities in the nited Kingdom and elsewhere of funded over unfunded esearch makes researchers vulnerable to two different kinds interested requests for money without strings or quality assurance. Nonetheless, we should be concerned by any drift in the direction of funding only the research whose results are likely ex ante to be ideologically or commercially convenient to the funder, especially if the reporting and interpretation of these results is partly controlled by that funder. In the second place, research is increasingly seen in commercial terms in which universities are seen not only as sites of liberal learning and independent inquiry but also as incubators of commercially exploitable technologies and services and of low cost, high quality policy advice for the state. Furthermore, internal pressure within universities exists to extend and diversify the kind of commercial and quasi-commercial work undertaken by university-based researchers. This is both to improve inward income streams and investment, and to enhance the university’s holdings of intellectual property rights. Research contracts are increasf pressure. In the first place, the pressure to seek external funding for ne’s research, which in the UK is driven by declining direct unding of universities, the ending of academic tenure, the esearch Assessment Exercise, and the high proportion of ingly seen as simply commercial contracts, and any distinction between the culture of universities and the culture of commerce is gradually being erased. The idea that certain kinds of gagging clause or exclusive rights over knowledge discovered just do not belong in contracts for scient f c a w