I’m on my way to Brussels to attend the second meeting of ERION. This nascent group aims to be a meeting point for people involved in research integrity and ethics at European institutions, as well as an advisor to the European Union in these matters. And I fly there excited by a piece of very…
On data management
NOTE: I will keep updating this with the new things that are discussed in the course… Last update, May 2019. One of the ‘Research Integrity” workshops I teach to PhD students deals with data management. It’s such an essential topic, but also a hard one to teach, especially when you are faced with people…
Just do it! (or my final reflection on #WCRI2017)
So, after all these posts, I would like to end with a general reflection on the World Conference on Research Integrity, the first I attended (and let me say, before you keep reading, that I did enjoy it very much, I think it was very relevant and would be very happy to attend more in…
It’s all about trust (#WCRI2017)
There were so many more talks during the WCRI – and it was impossible to attend them all, because there were about four parallel sessions at any time! So even though I’ve been writing about them for about a year, these posts are still far from a complete coverage…. But I’ve got to finish at…
Rethinking retractions (#WCRI2017)
In the session named “Rethinking retractions” of the 5th WCRI in Amsterdam, researcher Danielle Fanelli talked about creating a category of retractions that distinguishes those started by the authors because they realised an honest error (“honest self-retraction”), from others (e.g. started by journals), usually due to not-so-honest reasons. I think this would go a long…
Innovative approaches to openness in publishing (#WCRI2017)
Bianca Kramer from Utrecht University Library shoot a list of useful tools and resources to make science good, efficient and open. This was such an eye opener! There were some tools I was familiar with, but many I myself was unaware of, or I had only heard about. She spoke quickly and had so much…
Publishing and research ethics as wicked problems (#WCRI2017)
Virginia Barbour, until recently president of the COPE, chaired the session on ‘publishing and ethics, wicked problems’. She pinpointed how basic training for scientists often neglects ethics (something some of us are trying to solve!), or how it’s easier each time to modify images sent to papers (a quick look at PubPeer will tell you…
Introducing QA in research (#WCRI2017)
Perhaps one of the most impressive initiatives related to training I heard during the conference was one about incorporating research quality assurance into PhD research training. Rebecca Davies, from the University of Minnesota, linked the concept of QA – Quality Assurance – to research at two levels: sound scientific principles (What do we do) good…
Integrating transparency into a university quality management system (#WCRI2017)
The first talk I attended (other than the plenaries) was by Patricia C. Henley, who runs the Research governance and integrity office of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her job is to “save researchers from themselves”, as she joked. The LSHTM is the legal sponsor of 88 trials, many of them drug…
The role of governments on Research Integrity (#WCRI2017)
Three speakers, all of them politicians, talked on the second plenary session of the 2017 World Conference on Research Integrity about the role of governments in fostering research integrity. Jet Bussemaker, a member of the Dutch Parliament (Ministry of Health) and an academic herself, talked about the importance of independent research in today’s society and introduced…
The science factor 