David L. Wiesenthal

Department of PsychologyCentre for Practical Ethics

October 3, 2012

Integrity and Ethics in the Research Endeavour

“I don’t know who’s been gossiping about ethics instead of sex, but hopefully, they’re already fired.”

House, Episode: The Right Stuff

Principles of Medical Ethics

• Autonomy

• Nonmaleficence

• Beneficence

• Justice/Equity

Beauchamp, T. L. & Childress, J. F. (2006). Principles of biomedical ethics (6th ed.)., New York: Oxford University Press.

The Canadian Tri-Council Research Ethics Code

• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)

• Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR)

Core Ethical Principles TCPS 1 TCPS2

• Respect for human dignity

• Respect for free & informed consent

• Respect for vulnerable persons

• Respect for privacy & confidentiality

• Respect for justice & inclusiveness

• Balancing harms/benefits• Minimizing harm &

maximizing benefits

• Respect for persons

• Concern for welfare

• Justice

Tri-Council Code

•To perform research on aboriginals in Canada, the Tri-Council has added another layer of review of human research.

•The leadership of the aboriginal community, in addition to the individual member of the aboriginal community in question must provide informed consent.

Research Ethics Codes

• Given the post-war history of international concern with research involving human suffering during WWII, it was understandable that the initial efforts to draft ethics codes dealt exclusively with the proper treatment of human participants.

• Today’s codes (e.g., the Tri-Council Statement) still emphasize the focus on the human participant, while ignoring the role of the research funders and the host institutions.

• REBs focus at the lowest level of the triangle, the participants.

The Canadian Research Triangle

Participants

Funding agencies/host institutions

Data collectors

Investigators

REBs

Aboriginal

leadership

University administration

REB Focus

Science’s Moral & Ethical Principles

• Honesty• Carefulness• Openness• Freedom• Credit• Education

• Social responsibility• Legality• Opportunity• Mutual respect• Efficiency• Respect for participants

Resnick, D. (1998). The ethics of science: An introduction. New York: Routledge

“Research integrity is the coherent and consistent application of values and principles essential to encouraging and achieving excellence in the search for, and dessemination of, knowledge. These values are included in honesty, fairness, trust, accountability, and openness” (p. 38)

Expert Panel on Research Integrity (2010). Honesty, accountability and trust: Fostering research integrity in Canada. Council of Canadian Academics: Ottawa.

Principles of Research Integrity

“Honesty- Being straightforward, and free of fraud and deception

Fairness- Being impartial and using sound judgment free of prejudice or favouritism

Trust- Being reliable, as a person or institution, through character and action

Accountability- Being responsible and answerable for one’s actions

Openness- Being transparent in process and practice, as characterized by visibility or accessibility of information” (p. 38).

Expert Panel on Research Integrity (2010). Honesty, accountability and trust: Fostering research integrity in Canada. Council of Canadian Academics: Ottawa.

Research Integrity Concerns

• Integrity statements and institutional concerns in response to a host of recent issues that have received widespread publicity are aimed at the level of the investigators.

Research Integrity Issues

• Conflict-of-interest• Plagiarism• Authorship credit• Financial accounting issues• Data falsification• Data fabrication• Failure to obtain informed consent• Breach of confidentiality

Research Integrity Issues (con’t.)

• Deviation from research protocol• Reviewer confidentiality• Multiple publication of the same data?• Multiple submission of a manuscript to several

journals

Honest & unintentional errors are NOT covered under the rubric of research integrity.

The Canadian Research Triangle

Participants

Funding agencies/host institutions

Data collectors

Investigators

REBs

Aboriginal

leadership

University administration

Research Integrity Focus

Funding agencies/host institutions

University administration

Why not focus on the entire triangle?

Change in Focus of Concern in Research Ethics

Experimenter-Subject Dyad

Experimenter-Subject Dyad Sponsor-Investigator

Danger to Investigators• Traditionally, ethics codes

restricted their concern to participants’ safety and well-being.

• The safety and well-being of investigators conducting research in war zones, terrorist camps or with biohazards needs to be addressed.

• The data collectors are often students

Issues and Problems

• What about self-plagiarism?

• Lengthy manuscript reviews and publication delays may encourage multiple submissions of the same manuscript.

• File draw problem of research relegated to files and not submitted for publication because of failures to obtain statistical significance.

• Corporate sponsorship may threaten academic freedom.

• Conflict-of-interest issues—what is the nature of the conflict and who decides what constitutes a conflict?

• Protection of whistle blowers alerting institutions to threats to research integrity.

Conflict-of-interest

• There are conflicts other than financial ones:

• How do our values dictate the research areas we chose, the methodology employed to confirm the hypotheses? Is scholarship value-free?

• What about scholarly publications with husbands, wives, partners, children? Do we provide authorships to these individuals? What about faculty supervising their spouses theses/dissertations?

Why is this man laughing?

• Mayor Rob Ford has been involved with several conflict-of-interest matters, but has argued that as long as he didn’t receive money, no COI existed.

Academic Freedom/Conflict of Interest Incidents in Canadian Medical Research

Dr. Nancy Olivieri Dr. David HealyCanadian Medical Association Journal

Institutional Failures to Provide Academic Freedom

Stephen Harper vs. Federal Scientists

Dr. David Tarasick (Environment Canada)

Tarasick had researched a hole over the Arctic twice the size of Ontario caused by ozone in the British science journal Nature.

Dr. Kristina M. Miller, Head, Molecular Genetics, Fisheries and Oceans Canada

The Privy Council Office stopped Dr. Miller from conducting interviews based upon her article in Science on the decline of sockeye salmon in British Columbia.

Peter Kent, Minister of the Environment

The Minister described the muzzling of Federal scientists as “established practice”. Kent left his job as anchorman of the National (CBC) after petitioning the CRTC not to renew its broadcast licence until management “created procedures and protocols to prevent political interference in editorial decision-making”.

http://o.canada.com/2012/04/24/kent-defends-muzzling-as-established-practice/

VS.

This version of Kent presented (1984) a CBC documentary on the coming dangers of the greenhouse effect.

Plagiarism/Fabrication in News MediaIntegrity Issues are Not Only Issues for

Universities

• Margaret Wente (Globe & Mail)

• Jonah Lehrer (The New Yorker)

• Janet Cooke* (Washington Post)

• Mike Barnicle (Boston Globe)

• Maureen Dowd (New York Times)

• Jayson Blair (New York Times)

• Fareed Zakaria (CNN, Time, trustee, Yale

• Patricia Smith (Boston Globe)

* Pulitzer Prize winner

Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971)

Hearnshaw, L. S. (1979). Cyril Burt, psychologist. London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton.

Burt, the first British psychologist to receive a knighthood, fabricated his data regarding the similiarity of twins’ I.Q scores. He also fabricated the names of collaborators to strengthen the credibility of his data which often had the exact same correlation of I.Q. scores over several studies.

Kamin, L. J. (1974). The science and politics of I.Q. Potomac, MD: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield & the MMR vaccine/autism affair

Dr. Wakefield, in a conflict-of-interest situation, falsely claimed the MMR vaccine was linked to autism. This resulted in many parents

refusing these vaccinations for their children.

Recent Academic Integrity Scandals

• Eric Poehlman (University of Vermont, University of Montreal)

• Diederick Stapel (University of Groningen, NL)

• Mark Hauser (Harvard)

Recent Academic Integrity Scandals

• Dr. Chandra was believed to have fabricated data regarding the use of multivitamins to reverse memory loss in the elderly. He was unable to produce the data, claiming it had been stolen or went missing.

Dr. Ranjit Chandra Memorial University

Prof. Dongqing Li (Canada Research Chair & Yasaman Dajhighi (Ph.D student) have retracted a plagiarised manuscript from Microfuidics and Nanofluidics. They copied the work of researchers at MIT and UC Santa Barbara/

Grant Fraud & Murder

• Dr. William Douglas (Biology, Tufts University) embezzled $67,000 from research grants to pay Robin Benedict, a prostitute he became infatuated with—when she ultimately sought to end the relationship, the enraged Professor Douglas killed her. He served 8 ½ years in prison.

Carpenter, T. (1988). Missing beauty: A true story of murder and obsession. NY: Norton

Academic-Corporate Partnerships

• Jim Balsillie of Research in Motion offered funding to Carleton and then York to establish a research and teaching centre in Waterloo that he would exert control over both the research topics and academic staff. The faculty at both universities rejected the potential donation.

Problems

• University required to fund REB’s costs at a time when funding is limited.

• Who will fund the costs of research integrity investigations and the legal costs they may entail?

Problems

• University-based researchers face REB review and possible integrity investigation, but not for those outside of universities (e.g., governmental officials, governmental scientists, reporters, biographers, researchers in independent research centres, etc.).

• Should all these professionals be held to the same standard?

What Should Be Done?

• I am proposing a union of both research integrity and research ethics functions.

What Should Be Done?

• Every organization funded from Canadian sources needs to have a super-committee that deals with both a research integrity committee/office and the research ethics board. As both integrity and ethics in the research endeavour are vital, these concerns should be centralized and given equal importance in the host institution

What Should Be Done?

• Enactment of shield laws—Stats Can employees are protected by statute from subpoena. NIH (US) provides the “Confidentiality Kiosk” (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/coc/) which are not dependent upon NIH funding. Canadian psychologists do not have confidentiality under the Canada Evidence Act. Many states in the US provide privileged communication in both clinical and research activities.

• Reject local community veto of aboriginal research

• Establish risk assessment reviews apart from supervisory committee for graduate student research

What Should Be Done?

• Strengthen academic freedom for researchers (especially in medical institutions and aboriginal communities) by including a clause in the Memorandum of Understanding guaranteeing investigative freedom.

• Address the “file draw” problem of failure to replicate

• Speeding up the scholarly reviewing process may decrease the tendency to “kite” manuscripts to different journals.

• Publicize the policing of research integrity and require institutions to be totally transparent regarding incidents of data “enhancement”, fabrication, and other fraudulent practices.

• Universities must never surrender their hiring decisions, areas of research, or general direction to donors.

What Should Be Done?

• Rethink science education practices where grades for lab work/projects involving data collection are graded on the basis of how close the obtained results approach a theoretical or expected outcome.

• Instead, grade on projects where students are graded on their critical understanding of phenomena and NOT how well they are able to finagle data.

What Should Be Done?

High schools need to provide instruction on academic honesty and plagiarism.

• University orientation for first-year students should cover plagiarism and academic honesty.

• Plagiarism cases need to be dealt with by imposing an automatic failure in the course and a notation on the student’s record.

What should be done?

• Start plagiarism early in schooling—going beyond writing to cover artistic creations

• Explain why plagiarism is intolerable

• Explain why data fabrication is intolerable

• Events in the public realm require prompt, transparent and speedy resolution

• Integrity workshops for entering grad students

Protection for Whistle-Blowers & Critics

• Legislation is needed to protect whistle-blowers and critics of the established institutions.

• Blowing the whistle on members of an organization is a career-ending maneuver.

• No national protection yet—only a few provinces have protective legislation.

U of Ottawa Criminologists Go to Court to Protect Research Confidentiality

• Chris Bruckert (left) & Colette Parent are requesting the Quebec Superior Court to protect confidentiality. They had interviewed a sex trade worker 5 years ago who was now charged with murder.

• They are attempting to maintain the promise of confidentiality

CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin, January 2013, Vol. 60, No. 1

Dr. Chris Spence, former Director, Toronto District School Board

• Dr. Spence was involved with plagiarism of both a newspaper column, material from a public address as well as his doctoral dissertation at OISE.