Proceedings of the 4th World Conference on Research Integrity

Abstract

. The World Conferences were established as global forums for discussion of ideas, policies and empirical findings related to the responsible conduct of research. The Conferences aim to galvanise the global effort to strengthen the trustworthiness and reliability of research and encourage researchers worldwide to be accountable for their findings. Earlier conferences were held in Lisbon (2007), Singapore (2010) and Montréal (2010). The Rio conference attracted over 470 delegates from 42 countries, including leaders of research institutions and funding agencies, policy makers, editors and publishers, legal experts, researchers and graduate students. The theme of the conference was Research Rewards and Integrity: Improving Systems to Promote Responsible Research. These Proceedings contain the abstracts of the presentations given at the 4th World Conference in concurrent sessions, partner symposia, and poster sessions. Also included are summaries of the discussions in three focus tracks, which allowed delegates to consider and work on questions about the roles of funders, institutions, and countries in improving research systems and strengthening research integrity. Videos of the plenary presentations are available at the conference website (www.wcri2015.org). The 5 th World Conference will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 28-31, 2017 (www.wcri2017.org). The University of Queensland (UQ) is one of the leading research-intensive universities in Australia. UQ first developed formal policy and procedure relating to responsible conduct of research in 2011. The ongoing practical application of the first iteration of these policies identified lack of clarity in procedure with challenges arising from unintended consequences. A significant case of research misconduct in 2013 was a catalyst to commission a comprehensive external review of policy, procedure and practice relevant to research integrity, ethics and compliance in line with the Australian Code for Responsible Conduct of Research (2007). This presentation will describe the comprehensive strategy arising from this review to improve our policies, our resources, our systems and to ensure the practice of responsible conduct of research sits at the heart of UQ. Additional funds have enabled us to increase the number and seniority of staff in the Research Integrity Office, to purchase a purpose built complaints management system and the Epigeum online Research Integrity training tool. With a team of experienced research leaders and other key staff we are revising our responsible research policies and developing an education and communication plan to ensure senior staff such as Executive Deans and Heads of Schools are confident in working collaboratively with the Research Integrity Office and that all staff understand their responsibilities under the Australian Code and university policy. We have appointed a team of 16 senior researchers to the roles of Research Integrity Advisors embedded within each Faculty and Institute as a first triage point for people wi...

How researchers perceive research misconduct in biomedicine and how they would prevent it: A qualitative study in a small scientific community

“…In the current situation of great varieties of bodies and practices, perhaps a good way forward would be to have public information on the frameworks for research integrity at institutional or country level. The proposal of Research Integrity Country Report Cards, proposed at the World Conferences on Research Integrity (Kleinert and Marušić 2016), is an example of how the elements of research environment and efforts to promote research integrity could be captured and best experiences shared.…”

Contributions towards understanding and building sustainable science

“…The p-values are the result of independent t-tests comparing the experimental and control conditions within each respective set of a study. In order to test whether a distribution of independent p-values might be fabricated, we propose using the Fisher method (Fisher 1925;O'Brien et al 2016). The Fisher method originally was intended as a meta-analytic tool, which tests whether there is sufficient evidence for an effect (i.e., right-skewed p-value distribution).…”

Plagiarism in South African management journals: A follow-up study

“…Horn 11 notes that such income contributes substantially to institutional funding. In turn, many universities allocate part of this funding to the faculties, departments and individual academics who produced the publications -a practice not considered to be the norm elsewhere in the world 12 and one that could potentially promote unethical authorship 13 . Accordingly, this paper also serves to alert universities to the need to ensure that the research output submitted to the DHET for subsidy, is, in fact, the original work of the given author/s.…”