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Fostering research integrity in Europe.A new European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity will be presented by the European Science Foundation at the World Conference on Research Integrity. The code addresses good practice and bad conduct in science, offering a basis for trust and integrity across national borders.
This Europe-wide code offers a reference point for all researchers, complementing existing codes of ethics and complying with national and European legislative frameworks. It is not intended to replace existing national or academic guidelines, but represents agreement across 30 countries on a set of principles and priorities for self-regulation of the research community. It provides a possible model for a global code of conduct for all research.
"Science is an international enterprise with researchers continually working with colleagues in other countries. The scientists involved need to understand that they share a common set of standards. There can be no first-class research without integrity," said Marja Makarow, Chief Executive of the European Science Foundation.
"Researchers build on each other's results so they must be honest with themselves, and with each other, and share the same standards of fairness, which makes the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity a vital document."
The code describes the proper conduct and principled practice of systematic research in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Research misconduct is quite rare, but just one extraordinary case can endanger the reputation of a university, a research community or even the reputation of science itself. One well-publicised allegation of research dishonesty or malpractice can call to question the efforts of thousands of scientists and decades of research effort. Europe has experienced several well publicised cases recently at, for example, the University of East Anglia in the UK, and at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
The term 'research misconduct' embraces many things, including insufficient care for the people, animals or objects that are the subject of or participants in research; breaches of confidentiality, violation of protocols, carelessness of the kind that leads to gross error and improprieties of publication involving conflict of interest or appropriation of ideas. Many of these unacceptable research practices are addressed in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.
The code was developed from meetings and workshops involving the European Science Foundation (ESF) Member Organisations who are 79 national funding bodies, research-performing agencies, academies and learned societies from 30 countries. They worked with the All European Academies (ALLEA). The next steps in implementing the code will be discussed in the autumn by ESF Member Organisations.
Comment: Personal integrity, love of truth, fairness, conscience, no conflicts of interest, taking responsibility, unbiased scientific research, etc. These are pretty words that we all learned to associate with members of scientific community. And why not? After all, they are supposed to be the brightest of us all; the ones that help to create a better future.
The problem with such association is, that it is no more than an illusion, and a dangerous one at that, especially when we provide scientists and whoever funds their research with a silent consent to shape, control and influence our lives any way they see fit. Take a look at the following quotes to understand what is really going on in the scientific community:
Choosing research problems can be likened to an investment process (Bourdieu 1975, 1988). Scientists have available a certain amount of "capital" - knowledge, experience, time and effort - that they can invest in different ways. A conservative investment strategy is to pursue small, incremental innovations, with a high likelihood of success and a modest return of investment.[...] A risky strategy is to pursue a speculative idea: the likelihood of success may be low but the returns, if the idea pans out, can be huge.[...]
A different investment calculation comes into play, though, when it comes to someone else's ideas. To examine or even promote someone else's challenge to orthodoxy requires significant time and energy, yet the major returns go to another person, if they are recognized as the innovator. If the idea is a promising one, the temptation is to grab credit, for example by domesticating the radical idea and publishing in orthodox journals. It is no surprise that many innovators are afraid of having their ideas stolen. (Challenging Dominant physics paradigms by J.M Campanario and B.Martin)
In 1951, the U.S Congress established the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide financial support for post-World War II scientific research. Soon thereafter, someone at NSF or on the National Science Board, which is charged with oversight of NSF, had an idea, a really corrosive idea, the implementation of which would lead to the perversion and corruption of American science for decades ahead. The idea was that reviewers of scientific proposals to NSF for government research grant money should be anonymous; the crux of the idea being that anonymity would encourage honesty in evaluation even when those reviewers might be competitors or might have vested interests. Thus the concept of anonymous peer review was birthed.[...]
For decades, the use of anonymity within NSF, NASA, and elsewhere has been gradually corrupting American science. Unethical reviewers - secure, camouflaged, masked and hidden through anonymity - all too often make untrue and/or pejorative statements to eliminate their professional competitors. Nowadays, it is a pervasive, corrupt system that encourages and rewards the darkest elements of human nature. (Basic Cause of Current Corruption in American Science, Herndon, J. Marvin, 2008)
The most common view about how science works is that new ideas are judged on the basis of evidence and logic: if a new idea explains more data or provides more precise agreement with experiment, this counts strongly in its favor.
Karl Popper claimed that science advances by falsification (Popper 1963). In his view, it is the duty of scientists to attempt to disprove theories, confronting them with experimental data and rejecting them if they do not explain the data. Theories that cannot be falsified are, according to Popper, not scientific. Many scientists believe in falsificationism.
These conventional views were challenged by Thomas Kuhn (1970). Kuhn argued that scientists - and physicists in particular, since most of his historical examples were from physics - adhere to a paradigm, which is a set of assumptions and standard practices for undertaking research. If an experiment gives results contradictory to theory, then instead of rejecting the theory all together, alternative responses include rejecting the experiment as untrustworthy and modifying the theory to account for the new results (Chia 1998; Chinn and Brewer 1993).
When anomalies accumulate, the paradigm can enter a state of crisis and be ripe for overthrow by a new paradigm. This process of scientific revolution does not proceed solely according to a rational procedure but involves social factors such as belief systems and political arrangements. [...]
In any case, the idea of paradigms puts a different spin on the problem of new ideas in science. Rather than being dealt with according to logic and evidence, challenging ideas may be ignored or rejected out of hand because they conflict with current models. In effect, the logic and evidence used to establish the paradigm are treated as definitive and are unquestioningly preferred over any new logic and evidence offered that challenge the paradigm. During periods of "normal science", the ideas developed by mainstream scientists originate from current paradigms: they add more and more pieces to standard puzzles. Given that the paradigm is the source of ideas, it is not surprising that challenges to the paradigm - the framework that allowed mainstream scientists to contribute to the development of science - are seldom greeted with open arms. If a theory is not considered physically plausible, it may be rejected even though it makes successful predictions. (Challenging dominant physics paradigms, J.M Campanario and B.Martin, 2004)
In 2007 Professor Richard Lindzen described in the
Wall Street Journal the tremendous pressure upon scientists to conform to the
manufactured consensus of Global Warming:
Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.
Comment: Personal integrity, love of truth, fairness, conscience, no conflicts of interest, taking responsibility, unbiased scientific research, etc. These are pretty words that we all learned to associate with members of scientific community. And why not? After all, they are supposed to be the brightest of us all; the ones that help to create a better future.
The problem with such association is, that it is no more than an illusion, and a dangerous one at that, especially when we provide scientists and whoever funds their research with a silent consent to shape, control and influence our lives any way they see fit. Take a look at the following quotes to understand what is really going on in the scientific community: In 2007 Professor Richard Lindzen described in the Wall Street Journal the tremendous pressure upon scientists to conform to the manufactured consensus of Global Warming: