Report on the topic
“fostering a climate of excellence for Irish research”

The Irish National Forum on Research Integrity publishes a report from its inaugural national seminar on the topic ‘fostering a climate of excellence for Irish research’

In May 2017 the Irish National Forum on Research Integrity published a report on its’ inaugural National Seminar on Responsible Research and Innovation, held in February 2017. The theme was ‘fostering a climate of excellence for Irish research’. This was the first national seminar under the banner of the Forum, which was formally established in June 2015 to help implement the recommendations in the “National Policy Statement on Ensuring Research Integrity in Ireland”.

The seminar brought together Irish and internal experts to consider how Ireland can embed a culture of research integrity in its higher education institutions at all levels from undergraduates right up to senior management. Some of the key observations were:

  • The Forum is rather unique in Europe for having representatives from all RPOs and RFOs around the same table, working together to ensure continual development and adoption of good research practice.
  • Much progress has been made, but challenges remain, including supporting researchers to resolve their integrity dilemmas and how we show that research integrity is relevant to all researchers.
  • Tensions remain between the promotion of, and compliance with, good research practices versus poor practices that are often driven by the behaviour of colleagues and mentors
  • We need to support researchers to engage fully with the new “open science” agenda.
  • The public want to see progress in tacking research misconduct, but we don’t have any good quantitative measures we can use to show this, and these need to be developed.
  • Innovation 2020 (the Irish R&D Strategy) is acting as a driver of change for Ireland by specifically including actions on research integrity for the first time
  • The European Commission is also grappling with several issues in the area of research integrity, including: the lack of a clear picture of the integrity/misconduct environment in Europe; a lack of cooperation from some key players on occasion; and some denial in the form of false confidence that “all is well”.

Speakers:
Prof Nicholas Steneck, University of Michigan
Mr James Parry, UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO)
Mr. Isidoros Karatzas, Head of the Ethics and Research Integrity Sector, DG RTD, EU (whose slides were presented by Dr Maura Hiney, in his absence)
Dr Maura Hiney, Chair of the ALLEA Drafting Group for the revised European Code of Conduct
Prof Anita Maguire, Chair of the National Forum for Research Integrity (Ireland)

The seminar also presented four really interesting ‘dilemmas’ from the working lives of researchers, that captured both how prevalent and complexity of poor research practices.

 

More information on the members and role of the Forum can be found at: http://www.iua.ie/research-innovation/research-integrity/

The full report can downloaded from the Irish Universities Associate Website: http://www.iua.ie/publication/view/national-forum-on-research-integrity-inaugural-seminar-report-feb-2017/

The national policy statement on Ensuring Research Integrity in Ireland can be found at: http://www.iua.ie/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/National-Policy-Statement-on-Ensuring-Research-Integrity-in-Ireland-2014.pdf

Back to news & activities