Academies Report Urges Bolstered Efforts to Protect Integrity of Science

Kendrick Frazier

The scientific enterprise places high value on honesty and openness. These and other values serve it well. Nevertheless, a variety of challenges to the integrity of scientific research have been cause for much recent soul-searching.

There is growing concern, for example, that substantial percentages of published results in some fields, biomedicine and psychology in particular, are not reproducible. In the meantime, new deleterious practices have arisen, such as predatory new journals that do little or no peer review or quality control and yet charge authors big fees. And retractions of scientific papers are rising. These are just three of the problems addressed in Fostering Integrity in Research, a 284-page report by the Committee on Responsible Science of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The study was sponsored by a number of science-oriented agencies.

“The research enterprise is not broken, but it faces significant challenges in creating the conditions needed to foster and sustain the highest standards of integrity,” said Robert Nerem (Georgia Institute of Technology), chair of the committee. He called on everyone involved in science to “take deliberate steps to strengthen the self-correcting mechanisms that are part of research…”