Policing of science. A misconduct definition that finally sticks.

Abstract

POLICING OF SCIENCE A White House panel was due this week to unveil the first government-wide definition of improper conduct in scientific research. True to long-circulating rumors, the new definition would narrow research misconduct to three specific acts: fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (FFP). But officials at the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) say they've fleshed out these categories to ensure that a variety of serious misdeeds are explicitly included. The proposed misconduct policy, expected to appear in the Federal Register on 14 October, spells out a range of procedural steps for policing misconduct that all federal agencies would be forced to follow. The most controversial issue, however, is the definition, which the scientific community has agonized over for years. Those who have advocated a minimalist definition appear to have won the battle. “I think it is something that we are comfortable with,” says David Kaufman, a toxicologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), who notes nonetheless that his organization had not seen the final phrasing before Science went to press. The misconduct definitions now used by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) consist of FFP and “other serious deviations” from accepted practice, a clause that has been criticized as too vague. But other attempts to broaden FFP have faltered: A 1995 proposal for an updated HHS definition, from a commission headed by Harvard reproductive biologist Kenneth Ryan, drew fire for being too open-ended and potentially stifling creativity ( Science , 21 June 1996, p. [1735][1]). In April 1996, an OSTP committee called the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) set out to craft its own definition of research misconduct. The NSTC's proposal, obtained by Science , starts out much like the existing HHS definition, defining research misconduct as “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.” The added value of the NSTC wording is that it spells out each of these concepts in a sentence to ensure that they encompass misdeeds that may have fallen through the cracks. In addition, to make it clear that destroying a colleague's research data is considered misconduct, the NSTC definition added “manipulating research equipment” to the falsification category. The definition also explicitly covers plagiarism during peer review. Included in the proposed policy is the statement that a misconduct finding must amount to a “a significant departure from accepted practices of the scientific community.” NSF had argued in favor of such wording, which echoes its own misconduct definition. The agency has invoked a similar clause in at least one case—to discipline a professor who sexually harassed several students. Although “there's no flexibility to go beyond research misconduct more broadly than it's defined in this policy,” an OSTP official says, agencies and universities are free to investigate and prosecute other transgressions during the course of research. Parties now have 60 days to comment on the definition; the Office of Research Integrity and the National Academy of Sciences are planning a meeting on 17 November with FASEB, journal editors, and other groups to vet the proposal. Judging from the subdued reaction so far, it appears the agencies have reached the end of a long road toward a standard definition of research misconduct. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.272.5269.1735b