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Preamble<\/strong><\/p>\r\n No doubt about it, anyone trying to understand the concept ‘research culture’, in particular its problems and its routes to improvement, has their work cut out. In considering research culture, are we likely to find ourselves discussing ethics, or management technique, or HR policy, or diversity and inclusion, or something else entirely? As the Good Science Project moves into its third year I anticipate spending time trying to put order into this unruly list. I remember, at our very first meeting, I discussed the god Perseus, and his way of dealing with the Gorgon by refusing to look directly at those terrifying locks. Instead, by holding up a mirror, he could deal with his problem satisfactorily. Is there a sense in which ‘research culture’ cannot be looked at directly, that like Perseus we must hold up a mirror? This was certainly my thinking in setting up the Triptych of Science art project, where scientists made art works to express their views on their working life.<\/em><\/p>\r\n It always helps discipline the mind when an invitation to give a talk comes your way, and so I was grateful to the United Kingdom Research Integrity Office when it asked me to give a seminar, alongside my ex-student Mun Keat Looi, on the relation between research culture and science communication. I decided to take the opportunity to do some ‘organising’, both of how I see the history of the field, and how I think ‘ethics’ might have a role in issues of research culture. Thus, towards the end of my talk, I began to discuss how virtue ethics – that is, the branch of ethics that considers matters of character and stems from classical Greece – might be for us a key support in our search both for understanding, and for action. My next blog, in fact, will be a detailed look at how ethics, and what aspects of ethics, might illuminate our thoughts about research culture.<\/em><\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n I reproduce below the briefing notes I provided to UKRIO and the participants of the webinar.<\/em><\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n Preamble No doubt about it, anyone trying to understand the concept ‘research culture’, in particular its problems and its routes to improvement, has their work cut out. In considering research culture, are we likely to find ourselves discussing ethics, or management technique, or HR policy, or diversity and inclusion, or something else entirely? As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1782,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-culture"],"yoast_head":"\n
Hand-out notes for UKRIO webinar talk by Dr Stephen Webster, Imperial College London. 26th June: ‘Science Communication and Science Integrity’.<\/strong>
Introduction<\/strong>
Science communication is generally considered to be the facilitation of science-society relations, through a number of formats: science journalism, university outreach and communication, policy initiatives and social science research. However, a very important aspect of science communication concerns the issue of how, within a research institution, scientists communicate with each other. Therefore, in today\u2019s webinar, if Mun Keat Looi considers integrity and science journalism as a key external communication issue, I will look at something more internal: integrity and daily laboratory life. While Mun Keat looks at how science journalists manage the various and often conflicting demands of their profession, so I will look at the way research integrity is sometimes vulnerable to the conflicting demands of the life scientific.
A Brief History of Science Integrity<\/strong>
The United Kingdom Research Integrity Office, today\u2019s host of our discussion, was set up in 2006. Fourteen years earlier, in 1992, the US Department of Health had instituted the Office of Research Integrity, in response to anxieties running from the early 1980s about some well-publicised, even sensational, cases of scientific misconduct. An example would be the David Baltimore Affair. Later in 1997, responding also to what was felt to be rising cases of misconduct, all of them quite challenging to deal with, British journal editors, including Richard Horton of The Lancet, set up The Committee on Publication Ethics (\u2018COPE\u2019). By this time the problem of scientific misconduct was raising serious issues for the journals, for the universities, and indeed for the whole concept of science as a truth-gathering exercise. Quite a range of interesting comment began to accumulate, with the MRC scientist Peter Lawrence FRS being notably influential through his thought-provoking 2002\/3 Nature articles \u2018Rank Injustice\u2019 and The Politics of Publication. A particularly high-profile case in 2005\/6, involving the multiple and well-publicised ethical transgressions of scientist Woo Suk Hwang, can be seen as a defining moment.
Many reports and codes of conduct followed this 2005 watershed. One such code of conduct was Sir David King\u2019s Rigour, Respect and Responsibility, which had its university launch at Imperial College in 2007. In the same year Imperial\u2019s graduate school started its compulsory course \u2018Science, Research and Integrity\u2019, where neophyte scientists could discuss these issues, and \u2013 very importantly \u2013 give their point of view. It was as a result of Sir David King\u2019s work, and courses similar to the one offered by Imperial, that a subtle but important shift occurred. While the misconduct cases we read about in those years seemed always to involve astonishing examples of individual frailty and corruption, leading to the view that we were dealing here with \u2018bad apples\u2019, wise heads, including those of PhD students, reminded us that if ethics always has an individual component, the institutional aspect is critically important too. Slowly we moved in the direction of this question: \u2018How Can Our Institution Support Good Science?\u2019 Then, in 2014, under the guidance of Professor Ottoline Leyser (now CEO of Research England), the Nuffield Council on Bioethics launched at Imperial College their seminal report \u2018The Culture of Scientific Research\u2019. This brave document made plain the issue of institutional responsibility. It asked: how can an institution make unethical behavior less likely? And, particularly, it seemed to imply that we must be as diligent in discussing culture as we are in chasing down example of misconduct. In sum, as I discuss in the webinar, discussions of research integrity have roots in very different styles of discourse: there is an alarm about misconduct, and there is an aspirational, fervent desire for something just as complex, \u2018good science\u2019. Does this \u2018mix\u2019 of discourse pose problems?
What Does \u2018Integrity\u2019 Mean?<\/strong>
While I wouldn\u2019t say that the discourses of \u2018misconduct\u2019 and \u2018integrity\u2019 are wildly incompatible, some thought is needed over how to navigate a rather heterogeneous set of concepts. And while \u2018misconduct\u2019 centres on the transgression of fairly well-defined rules, it is hard to know quite what \u2018research culture\u2019 means. For example, should we talk about \u2018research cultures\u2019, in the plural? That might look like a good option, but then we remember the important philosophical tradition, still central today, that science is unified: it has a method; it doesn\u2019t matter where you do your science or who you are; a scientific fact is the same, whether you are in Southampton or in Sydney. Culture scholars, however, spend a lot of their time exploring how cultures evolve, and how they remain sustainably different. Meanwhile a growing aspect of enhancing research culture relies on the idea that both in in our wider lives and in our laboratories, identity recognition is central to the flourishing of our working life.
The word \u2018integrity\u2019 is usually defined as \u2018honesty, the capacity to inspire well-founded trust, a position of moral worth\u2019. However there is a second, equally important meaning. This is to do with wholeness, of different parts within a system being in communication, being in balance, and being mutual, interested and respectful.
Research Integrity and Science Communication<\/strong>
It is this second aspect of the word integrity that forms the basis of my short talk. I will be exploring how concepts like balance, and of course imbalance, are helpful tools in understanding research culture. At Imperial College we have been promoting the idea that research culture (among other things) is a matter of ethics. Similarly, at Imperial, we understand the ethics of research culture as broader than that routinely examined by research ethics committees. As I shall briefly suggest at the end of my talk, to attain the required ethical breadth, more to do with character and habit than with rules and policy, it may be helpful to study the great tradition of Virtue Ethics, stemming from Aristotle and the traditions of classical Athens.
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