Nautilus

The proportion of the public that knows about nanotechnology has reached a plateau, which means that it is now necessary to develop new approaches to explore public perceptions in greater detail than before, according to the November Editorial in Nature Nanotechnology (4, 695; 2009). The Editorial draws attention to "the publication of the first meta-analysis of survey data on public attitudes towards the risks and benefits associated with nanotechnology (see page 752 of this issue). Terre Satterfield and colleagues looked at 22 publications reporting the results of surveys and found that the public response to nanotechnology has, so far, been different to the responses to previous new technologies in a number of ways. In particular, and contrary to expectations, unfamiliarity with nanotechnology is not strongly associated with risk aversion. The meta-analysis also reveals that twice as many people think that the benefits will outweigh risks as vice versa, but the authors caution that "a large minority of those surveyed (44%) is unsure, suggesting that risk judgments are highly malleable." Satterfield and colleagues also call for the development of new methods to understand public responses to nanotechnologies. In an accompanying News & Views on page 705 Dan Kahan concludes that "the meta-analysis suggests that public attitudes toward nanotechnology remain open to the guidance of sound science, but that it would be a serious error to take such receptivity for granted.".... It is important that the nanotechnology community — researchers, funders, regulators and others — continues to work hard to ensure that nano does not become the next GM, all the time accepting that there might always be new questions to answer and new challenges to address."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 13, 2009
Categories: Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

The US Department of Health and Social Security's Public Health Service (PHS) ruled in 2005 that "Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit." in its November Editorial 'Data divorce', Nature Genetics (41, 1157; 2009) takes the Office of Research Integrity (part of the US Department of Health and Human Services) to task for producing a different definition:

Many allegations of plagiarism involve disputes among former collaborators who participated jointly in the development or conduct of a research project, but who subsequently went their separate ways and made independent use of the jointly developed concepts, methods, descriptive language, or other product of the joint effort. The ownership of the intellectual property in many such situations is seldom clear, and the collaborative history among the scientists often supports a presumption of implied consent to use the products of the collaboration by any of the former collaborators.
For this reason, ORI considers many such disputes to be authorship or credit disputes rather than plagiarism. Such disputes are referred to PHS agencies and extramural institutions for resolution.

Nature Genetics points out that this additional definition of plagiarism was considered but not included in the PHS statement, and asks the ORI to correct its definition of plagiarism to the one published by its parent body (PHS). By "providing a channel for fair and accountable investigation, the ORI also provides an important deterrent to scientific misconduct, not only for US researchers but, by example, for the global research community. Therefore, we suggest that it is counterproductive to the reporting of misconduct—and to the deterrence of misconduct—for the ORI to be seen to be turning away a significant proportion of its cases. Indeed, these are the very cases in which thefts of data and ideas are most likely to occur."

Nature journals' policy on plagiarism. (Includes links to relevant journal editorials, free to read online.)

NIH checklist of simple rules for researchers.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 03, 2009
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (1)

With sequencing costs dropping, it is likely that direct-to-consumer genetic services will soon include affordable whole-genome sequencing. Consumers who have familiarized themselves with the limitations of these data will be better equipped for the 3 gigabases of information that may soon come their way, according to the Editorial in the November issue of Nature Methods (6, 783; 2009). What is the right approach for direct-to-consumer genetic tests, asks the Editorial, given concerns about analytical validity, accuracy, clinical validity, clinical usefulness, helpfulness to consumers, and that the genetic variants tested for are actually associated with increased disease risk? Different countries are handling these issues in different regulatory and legislative ways, but the Editorial argues that a restrictive approach is not helpful, particularly given the huge range of genetic conditions and possible 'tests'. Although companies should do more in terms of providing unbiased information to the public, it is up to the consumers to educate themselves about the benefits, risks and limitations.
The Nature Methods editors invite readers to discuss this Editorial at the journal's blog, Methagora.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 02, 2009
Categories: Education, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Continuing the theme of yesterday's post about data sharing, Nature Biotechnology is running an Editorial this month (Nature Biotech. 27, 777; 2009), 'DNA confidential', pointing out that as "the cost of human genome sequencing plunges and large-scale genome-phenotype studies become possible, society should do more to reward those individuals who choose to disclose their data, despite the risks". The Editorial continues:

"The genome sequence of Patient Zero is disclosed on p. 847 of this issue. The paper is notable not only because it provides the first description of the performance of a single-molecule platform in sequencing a human genome (90% of it, at least), but also because Stanford professor Stephen Quake (aka Patient Zero) opted to tell the world that it was his DNA that had been sequenced. Like scientific pioneers before him, Quake is heroically self-experimenting—testing the risks in publishing identifiable personal information of the most intimate kind."

The Editorial goes on to weigh up some of the risks and benefits to an individual and to society at large if people's genome sequences are generally available, covering healthcare, privacy issues and costs, concluding that "There will be some individuals, like Steve Quake, who will provide samples and data without an incentive; but when it comes to exploring the basis of being human and moving toward the goal of genomic medicine, society needs to do more to provide personal incentives to those who choose to disclose their data, despite the risks. After all, everybody will ultimately benefit—both those who share and those who choose not to."

Single-molecule sequencing of an individual human genome
Dmitry Pushkarev, Norma F Neff & Stephen R Quake
Nature Biotechnology 27, 847-850; 2009. doi:10.1038/nbt.1561

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 17, 2009
Categories: Data availability, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The cell biology literature contains manipulated data that distort findings, usually in an attempt to 'beautify' and, rarely, to commit fraud, states the September Editorial in Nature Cell Biology (11, 1045; 2009, free to read online) According to the Editorial, a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report, 'Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age', "arrives at no hard and fast rules; the panel found that different fields have quite different requirements. In the words of panel chairs Phillip Sharp and Daniel Kleppner, "the report provides a framework for dealing with the challenges to the community generated by the onrush of digital technology." Nevertheless, the key tenets that researchers are responsible for ensuring the integrity and accuracy of their data and appropriate training in the management of research data, that all data and experimental details from papers be publicly accessible and carefully archived to allow verification and to facilitate future discoveries, and that field-specific standards have to be developed by researchers, funders, societies and journals, benefit from being spelled out in one document."
Many of the recommendations in the report already are the policy of Nature Cell Biology and the other Nature journals: the Editorial provides further information about these, including references to past Editorials, with particular emphasis on various aspects of data manipulation and plagiarism -- which, although widely unrealised, extends to concepts as well as to copying text and illustrations.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 07, 2009
Categories: Access, Data availability, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Personal GenoME & Medicine: Hype or Reality? So runs the title of the next Talkscience evening at the British Library in London on 23 September. As usual, there is a Nature Network forum to provide more details of the event and to start the discussion going online before the meeting itself, so readers are encouraged to check that out and contribute ideas. How is cheaper, faster DNA sequencing helping or hindering our ability to understand disease, treatment and prevention? Which of the many single-nucleotide polymorphisms that have been identified in genome-wide association studies might be causal to a disease? How will advances in genome technologies lead to better diagnosis and treatments? What are the legal, ethical and other issues concerning "direct to consumer" personalised genomics?
These and other topics will be debated on 23 September, in an evening beginning with a talk by Alan Ashworth of the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre of the UK Instiute for Cancer Research.
SIgn up here to attend the Talk Science evening on 23 September.
Join and contribute to the associated Nature Network forum.
Other Nature Network forums.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 03, 2009
Categories: Communication, Conferences, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The distribution of human cell lines used in research should not be hindered by restrictions from donors, states an Editorial in Nature last week (460, 933; 2009 ; free to access online). The occasion of the Editorial is a Corrigendum relating to a paper published in the journal last year ('Generation of pluripotent stem cells from adult human testis' by
S. Conrad et al., Nature 456, 344-349; 2009). In the Corrigendum, the authors explain how the original patient consent forms to collect the material used to derive the pluripotent stem cells precluded distribution to third parties under the regulations of the relevant hospital ethics committee. (The authors also explain that they are going to cultivate new cells, under different terms of consent, which they can then distribute upon request.)
As the Editorial points out, failures to distribute cell lines are incompatible with Nature journal policies and with the efficient progression of scientific knowledge. The Corrigendum alerts investigators to this situation and the steps being taken to rectify it. Even when clinicians, researchers and their local ethics board follow internal procedures that promote both donor safety and medical research, serious problems can arise regarding the unhindered distribution of samples.
Here is a slightly shortened version of the rest of the Editorial:
The community was not that surprised by this situation — six of seven researchers contacted by Nature thought this could happen again. Researchers developing cell lines must investigate the restrictions associated with the human tissue they are using, particularly if someone else collected the samples, if the samples come from multiple clinical sources or if they come from several legal jurisdictions. If a scientist needs to create cell lines that might be used for as-yet-unforeseen purposes, only tissue with no restrictions should be used.
Journals can remind authors in their policy guidelines that authors of submissions that involve consent forms must make editors aware of any limits that result from those forms. The Nature journals will be revising their policies to make this clearer.
Most importantly, patients, researchers, clinicians, and review and ethics boards worldwide need to agree on conventions that are acceptable to most parties under most circumstances. Internationally standardized consent forms for the donation of human tissue should cover new uses, genomic comparisons, patents and product development, and should discourage limiting access or lifespan.
Ethics and review boards are set up to protect individuals, but can also go much further to promote research. No one can deny that donors need to understand the risks and benefits of a procedure, trial or donation. However, it seems most ethically responsible, given the value of research, for the boards to explain the consequences that restricted access and time limits can have on the value of a donor's tissue.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 27, 2009
Categories: Data availability, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature News (published online, 30 July 2009), by Alison Abbott:
A paper reporting the creation of sperm-like cells from human embryonic stem cells has been retracted by the editor of the journal Stem Cells and Development. The work had garnered headlines worldwide after being published three weeks ago (see earlier Nature News story).
The journal's editor-in-chief Graham Parker says he took the radical step on 27 July because two paragraphs in the introduction of the paper, entitled 'In Vitro Derivation of Human Sperm from Embryonic Stem Cells', had been plagiarised from a 2007 review published in another journal.
He had been alerted to the plagiarism on 10 July — three days after the article had been published online — by the editors of Biology of Reproduction. Parker says that the corresponding author, Karim Nayernia of the North East England Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle, UK, and the University of Newcastle, had failed to provide convincing evidence that the two paragraphs had been included in the submitted version of the manuscript by mistake.
The retraction has surprised even critics of the paper, who had complained that the work had been over-hyped. "If there is nothing else behind this, it seems a little harsh," says Harry Moore, co-director of the Centre for Stem Cell Biology at the University of Sheffield, UK.
Parker insists that there were no other problems with the paper other than the copied paragraphs. Along with five other editors of his journal, he nevertheless decided that because the paper included "an act of scientific misconduct, retraction was the correct course of action in this instance".
Nayernia declined to comment to Nature, but an official statement from the university says that the paper's original first author, Jae Ho Lee, a postdoc who has since left the university, was responsible for the plagiarism and has apologized to the authors. "No question has been raised about the science conducted or the conclusions of the research," according to the statement. "The name of Dr Lee has been removed from the first authorship," the statement continues. "The paper will now be submitted to another peer-reviewed academic journal."
The statement also says that the "correct version of the manuscript, upon the request of the journal's editor, had been immediately submitted to the journal during the process of proof reading".
The paper had been published online 'ahead of editing' to avoid undue delay, with proofreading happening after publication to correct textual or copy-editing errors, explains Parker. "But plagiarism can come to light at any point in the publishing process," he says. "Proofing isn't a magical stage that allows authors to correct any inappropriate acts."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a heated online discussion about the circumstances of the journal's decision at the Nature News website. You are welcome to add your views, either at the Nature News article or as a comment to this post.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 21, 2009
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature News (Nature 460, 163; 8 July 2009):
A former University of Tennessee professor has been sentenced to four years in prison for sharing sensitive technologies with his Chinese and Iranian graduate students.
J. Reece Roth, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering, was sentenced on 1 July by a Tennessee district court for violating the Arms Export Control Act. He had been developing ways to reduce the drag on unmanned planes, and employed two research assistants without obtaining the required licence (see Nature 442, 232–233; 2006). Roth plans to appeal the verdict.
In a separate case, a Chinese-born scientist who has lived in the United States for 23 years is suing the US government for rights violations for expelling him last year from the NASA Ames Research Center, California.
Haiping Su, a US citizen who received his doctorate in 1991 from Kansas State University in Manhattan, alleged in a case filed on 24 June in a San Jose federal court that a 2007 security badge-issuing process led to his illegal ousting.
Su was working on airborne systems for imaging forests. His attorneys say he had no involvement with classified material.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 15, 2009
Categories: Biosecurity, Data availability, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Medicine is the latest Nature journal to address the question of plagiarism. In its July Editorial (Nat. Med. 15, 707; 2009) the journal opines that scientific plagiarism—a problem as serious as fraud—has not received all the attention it deserves. The Editorial outlines a strategy that, it says, all-too-frequently works:

"You don't have the resources to do the experiments? Don't worry! A little creative writing might be all you need to sail through the financial crisis. Here's how: use a solid paper as your base; carry out a parallel set of experiments in your favorite model; tweak the data so that the numbers are not identical but remain realistic; and, when you're ready to write it all up, paraphrase the original paper ad libitum. Last, submit your new manuscript to a modest journal in the hopes that the authors of the paper you used as 'inspiration' won't notice your 'tribute' to their work—even though imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, their approval of your 'reworking' of their paper cannot be guaranteed. If all goes well, getting a couple of these manuscripts under your belt might make all the difference when you apply for that elusive grant."

The Editorial goes on to outline some common unethical practices in more detail, concluding that "journals have a vested interest in protecting their rights over what they publish. It is therefore not surprising that online tools, such as iThenticate, designed to spot similarities between an input text and the published literature, are becoming popular among publishers. But as with every other type of scientific misconduct, it is ultimately the community that needs to set appropriate standards and penalties to fight plagiarism."

Nature journals' policies on plagiarism and fabrication; on duplicate publication; and on image integrity and standards.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 14, 2009
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fraud in science is difficult to spot immediately, but, as high-profile cases show, it does get found out. Tackling plagiarism is at least becoming an easier fight, according to the July Editorial in Nature Physics (5, 449; 2009).

Scientific misconduct comes in many forms. Plagiarism, or "cut and paste" science, is one type, now being tackled by use of programs such as Déjà vu, which is based on the text-similarity software eTBLAST. From the Nature Physics Editorial: "When used on the Medline database, eTBLAST flagged up 74,790 pairs of papers similar in content or language. Following manual inspection, 2,125 have been labelled as duplicates, 1,697 as sanctioned, 1,498 as distinct, but the majority remain unverified. For two papers to be considered duplicates, they must share 85% of their text. Given the number of review articles and conference proceedings, the number of duplicates is not surprising — although it is surprising that most of the duplications by the same authors are usually published within five months of each other, which means that they were probably submitted to different journals at the roughly the same time — but 228 of the duplicates are from different authors, which suggests plagiarism. These cases are reported to the authors and journal editors."

For publishers, CrossCheck is available for checking submissions against 20 million publications, and is used by Nature Publishing Group. The Editorial concludes by hoping that this kind of publication policing will feed into improved scientific practice — because it is only a matter of time before fraudsters are caught.

Nature journals' policies on plagiarism and fabrication; on duplicate publication; and on image integrity and standards.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 06, 2009
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Biotechnology's June issue contains several articles of particular interest to scientists as communicators, authors and entrepreneurs. Here are a few highlights:

Nature Biotechnology 27, 514 - 518 (2009).
Science communication reconsidered.
Tania Bubela et al.
As new media proliferate and the public's trust and engagement in science are influenced by industry involvement in academic research, an interdisciplinary workshop provides some recommendations to enhance science communication. Among these are that graduate students need to be taught about the social and political context of science and how to communicate with the media and a diversity of publics; that the factors contributing to media hype and errors (largely of omission) are explicitly recognized to allow science institutions and media organizations informed communication policies; research on science communication should be expanded to include online and digital media; more investment in the systematic tracking of news and cultural indicators, including traditional news outlets but also radio, entertainment TV, religious media, the web and new documentary genres; and a new 'science policy' beat in journalism courses to fill in the gaps between the technical backgrounders preferred by science writers and the conflict emphasis of political reporters. Finally, the authors argue, if there is a major threat to science journalism, it is that science journalists are losing their jobs at for-profit news organizations; new models of support for science journalism are needed, in which online digital formats blend professional reporting with user-generated content and discussion.

Nature Biotechnology 27, 528-530 (2009):
Maters of their universe.
Genentech—the biotech venture that launched a thousand companies—is no longer its own master. In March, majority stakeholder Roche reached an agreement with the South San Francisco, California–based company under which the Swiss drug maker would take over the biotech for $46.8 billion. But many remember those first years when a small team of bright, intellectually disciplined young scientists—often rowdy and personally eccentric people—got the company up and running. Randy Osborne and Laura DeFrancesco caught up with a few of those pioneers to talk about that era, their time and how they felt leading the charge.

Nature Biotechnology 27, 531 - 537 (2009).
Wasting cash—the decline of the British biotech sector.
Graham Smith, Muhammad Safwan Akram, Keith Redpath & William Bains
Undercapitalization and overgenerous boardroom compensation for management have been major contributors to the poor performance of UK biotech. Despite historic leadership in European biotech, the UK's industry has suffered a near collapse in the past two years and now has little private or public investment and no candidates for world-class companies. Why do shareholders allow UK public biotech companies to accumulate top management that pays itself so much, is unmotivated to drive shareholder value and as a consequence apparently drains the company of resources, notably cash? These questions, and others, are addressed in the feature.

Nature Biotechnology website.
Nature Biotechnology guide to authors.
Nature Biotechnology conference programme.
Nature Biotechnology focuses and supplements.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 25, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Conferences, Education, Ethics, Public and media, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

Various codes of conduct have been proposed for nanotechnology —and in the June issue of Nature Nanotechnology (4, 336; 2009), Richard Jones examines what they mean for individual researchers, particularly in the light of the European Commission's code, aimed at academic research rather than at businesses and other commerce.
"How is responsibility divided between the individuals who do science, and the organizations, institutions and social structures in which science is done? There's a danger that codes of ethics focus too much on the individual scientist, at a time when many scientists often feel rather powerless, with research priorities increasingly being set from outside and with the development and application of their research out of their hands. In this environment, too much emphasis on individual accountability could prove alienating, and could divert us from efforts to make the institutions in which science and technology are developed more responsible.
Scientists, however, should not completely underestimate their importance and influence collectively, even if individually they feel impotent. Part of the responsibility of a scientist should be to reflect on how to justify one's work, and how people with different points of view might react to it, and such scientists will be in a good position to have a positive influence on the various institutions they interact with, such as funding agencies. But we still need to think more generally about how to make responsible institutions for developing science and technology, as well as responsible nanoscientists."

About Nature Nanotechnology.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 23, 2009
Categories: Communication, Disciplines, Education, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the text of an online petition on the Sense About Science website:
The law has no place in scientific disputes
We the undersigned believe that it is inappropriate to use the English libel laws to silence critical discussion of medical practice and scientific evidence.
The British Chiropractic Association has sued Simon Singh for libel. The scientific community would have preferred that it had defended its position about chiropractic for various children's ailments through an open discussion of the peer reviewed medical literature or through debate in the mainstream media.
Singh holds that chiropractic treatments for asthma, ear infections and other infant conditions are not evidence-based. Where medical claims to cure or treat do not appear to be supported by evidence, we should be able to criticise assertions robustly and the public should have access to these views.
English libel law, though, can serve to punish this kind of scrutiny and can severely curtail the right to free speech on a matter of public interest. It is already widely recognised that the law is weighted heavily against writers: among other things, the costs are so high that few defendants can afford to make their case. The ease and success of bringing cases under the English law, including against overseas writers, has led to London being viewed as the "libel capital" of the world.
Freedom to criticise and question in strong terms and without malice is the cornerstone of scientific argument and debate, whether in peer-reviewed journals, on websites or in newspapers, which have a right of reply for complainants. However, the libel laws and cases such as BCA v Singh have a chilling effect, which deters scientists, journalists and science writers from engaging in important disputes about the evidential base supporting products and practices. The libel laws discourage argument and debate and merely encourage the use of the courts to silence critics.
The English law of libel has no place in scientific disputes about evidence; the BCA should discuss the evidence outside of a courtroom. Moreover, the BCA v Singh case shows a wider problem: we urgently need a full review of the way that English libel law affects discussions about scientific and medical evidence.

If you would like to find out more, and sign the petition, please visit Sense About Science.
Comments from some of the signatories can be found here.

Related articles:
Nature News 3 June 2009: Science writer will appeal libel case ruling.
Nature Network: Using the law to stifle scientific debate.
Reciprocal Space blog: Keep the libel laws out of science.
Nature Network bloggers' forum: A message to Nature Network users.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 04, 2009
Categories: Communication, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

A court case between one of Britain's leading science writers and an organization representing alternative medicine practitioners is causing renewed concern about the potential for libel laws to stifle debate on scientific issues (Nature News, 13 May 2009).
Simon Singh, author of Fermat's Last Theorem and other books, is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association over an article he wrote for the Guardian newspaper last year. In an unusual move, the BCA is suing Singh personally, and not the newspaper.
The case has international implications for science reporting and journalism more generally, warns Singh. It comes against a background of increasing concern in many quarters that litigants opt for British courts as they are seen as easier places to get a favourable result; a problem labeled 'libel tourism'.
Neil White, a partner at legal firm Taylor Wessing (which undertakes some legal work for Nature), says the case should serve as a warning not just for science writers, but more generally for scientists and all who write about similar topics. "I think there is a degree of ignorance on the part of scientists about libel law, particularly UK libel law," he says. "I do think there are some scientists who are rather arrogant about it, and think because they're scientists with a view to express on a matter of potentially considerable importance they can say what they please. That is just not the case. The lesson I think they need to learn is you can usually say what you want to say in a way that doesn't expose you to litigation, by taking a bit of care and taking a bit of advice."
Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, UK, says, "Recent history shows quite clearly there is a danger people can be silenced by the financial and legal might of their opponents."
What are your views? Please let us know, either by commenting at the Nature Network Opinion forum or at the Nature News website (where there is a comment in favour of the BCA, as well as others taking the opposite view). How confident are you about expressing a scientific opinion publicly? How well-informed are you about the legal consequences of what you might write on your blog or for a publication?
See also this Nature Network blog post by Stephen Curry and this alert at Nature Network by Brian Clegg .
Readers' comments at Nature Network or here will be considered for publication in Nature as Correspondence.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 20, 2009
Categories: Communication, Ethics, Public and media, Publishing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not all financial interests in drug discovery are detrimental, and many are essential for its success. But focusing on perceived conflicts of interest may cause true scientific corruption to go unnoticed, an opinion expressed in the latest Editorial in Nature Medicine (15, 463 - 464; 2009).
The Editorial describes how a laboratory finding is transformed into a new medicine, involving numerous steps and stakeholders. "In a simple case, a researcher discovers and publishes a new target, and an academic or industrial organization decides to commercialize it. After an initial period of development, this organization licenses the target or a lead compound to a pharmaceutical company with a view to take it to the market. The company sponsors clinical trials, the results of which are also published and evaluated by regulatory agencies that ultimately approve the new therapy for its use in humans. The company then promotes its new product to claim the largest possible share of the market. In an ideal scenario, a postmarketing follow-up of the compound gives the regulators further evidence to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the new medicine."
Money changes hands many times during this process, at various stages and raising several aspects of competing financial interests. The most negative effect of these, of course, is exposing patients to unsafe drugs. Competing financial interests are handled in a range of ways: some institutions have banned staff from consulting for or from owning stock; laws prevent exchange of gifts between doctors and companies; journals often ask authors to declare fiunancial interests as a prerequisite for publication and may ban scientists who report a financial interest from writing reviews or editorials.
The Editorial goes on to argue that it is seldom acknowledged that not all competing financial interests are equally insidious -- some are even necessary for the success of translational research. "Scientists who share their expertise with a company and clinicians who agree to conduct a clinical trial have to be compensated for their work in the same way that every other professional ought to be rewarded for his or her labor. To suggest that they should make their contributions freely is disingenuous, and to argue that they should not get involved at all can only slow the development of new medicines. Academic institutions and their employees must be free to benefit financially from the fruits of the advances made in their laboratories".
A main fear of competing financial interests is that they could lead to misconduct whenever a researcher has a financial incentive to fabricate data. The Editorial proposes that the focus of concern should move away from whether competing financial interests are publicly declared, and towards exposing and punishing scientific misconduct. ..." most financial interests do not represent a conflict as a matter of course and that the influence of money is negative only if it leads to scientific fraud—the one infidel we need to burn at the crusader's stake."

The full Nature Medicine Editorial, which discusses other aspects of this subject, can be found in the May issue of the journal.
Competing financial interest policies of the Nature journals.
Nature Medicine website.
Nature Medicine guide to authors.
Spoonful of Medicine, the Nature Medicine blog.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 19, 2009
Categories: Competing interests, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation is the first publicly funded UK centre dedicated to synthetic biology – the science of designing and building biological components that can perform useful functions, such as producing drugs or biofuels, according to an online Nature news story (published 12 May; doi:10.1038/news.2009.464).
From the news story: "One of the centre's senior staff is sociologist Nikolas Rose, director of the BIOS Research Centre for the study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics. Rose says he aims to make public engagement a key priority for the centre, to avoid a repeat of the public outcry that genetically engineered foods provoked across Europe. "The usual position of the social scientists it to be right downstream, this is a rare opportunity to work right at the beginning," says Rose.
Rose's team will train graduate students and staff to consider the social and ethical implications of their research. He says the centre will also work with government and industry to develop a suitable framework to regulate the products of synthetic biology, and to make intellectual-property claims.
"If the Imperial centre works, it's going to be setting the standard for this," says Pam Silver, a synthetic-biology researcher at Harvard University. Silver is in the process of setting up a synthetic-biology centre at Harvard University, but "so far there's been no real discussion of social scientists' role", she says.
The need for researchers to consider the societal and ethical dimensions of their work in synthetic biology was a key recommendation of a report published by the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering on 6 May. Richard Kitney, a bioengineer at Imperial, who chaired the working group behind the report, is co-director of the new centre, along with Paul Freemont, from Imperial's molecular biosciences division."

Nature journals' author polices on bioethics.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 14, 2009
Categories: Biosecurity, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

In its May Editorial, Nature Photonics (3, 237; 2009) describes some of the ways in which the Nature journals combat scientific misconduct and practices such as 'guest' authorship. Part of the Editorial concerns plagiarism:

"Many forms of plagiarism exist, but the goal is generally the same — to garner false or undue credit. Plagiarism sometimes involves reuse of another author's published work, but it is commonly thought that the most typical tool of the plagiarist is self-plagiarism: the reuse of substantial parts of an author's own published work, particularly without appropriate referencing, and less commonly, duplicate publication, in which the results are recycled in their entirety.
The peer-review process provides a net for catching offenders, but it cannot provide a fail-safe barrier. As a result, Nature Photonics is now starting to use the plagiarism-detection software CrossCheck, which makes comparative checks between provided manuscripts and those previously published and in an existing database. Any manuscript that seems to show an abnormally high match will be immediately investigated. Unfortunately, plagiarism can also occur without verbatim duplication of words or data. And it is here that the lines between normal and acceptable activity and plagiarism become smeared, and the likelihood of detection and punitive repercussions is diminished.
Using another researcher's arguments and logic, even if the text is not identical, without due reference is intellectual plagiarism. This type of plagiarism can be subtle and as simple as not including a reference to a highly relevant previous paper. Citation-related plagiarism, whether it is intentional, or due to gross negligence, can give an untruthful impression of precedence, reassigning credit from the original discoverer to another person.
When reporting scientific messages, it is an author's responsibility to find and acknowledge the critically relevant literature, or at least to have endeavoured to do so with rigour. Failing this can result in falsely apportioned claims, albeit caused by negligence.
If plagiarism is suspected in research results published by us, it is our policy to conduct an immediate investigation and if deemed appropriate to contact the author's institute and funding agencies and consider a formal retraction of the paper. Although it is often the first authors who have historically borne the brunt of confirmed misconduct allegations, our editorial policies highlight the serious responsibilities of all coauthors: "submission to a Nature journal is taken by the journal to mean that all the listed authors have agreed to the content". It is unreasonable to expect each author to be responsible for every aspect of the paper, but it is the responsibility of the corresponding author to manage the understanding that all authors are expected to have made reasonable attempts to check the findings submitted to a journal for publication."

The full text of this Nature Photonics Editorial.
Nature Photonics guide to authors.
About the Nature Photonics editors.
Nature journals policy on plagiarism.
Nature journals policy on authorship.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 04, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here is the text of an Editorial in the 30 April issue of Nature (458, 1078; 2009 - free to access online):
The Nature journals encourage authors to treat their data and their collaborators with the respect that their communities demand. High-profile journals have a duty to reinforce the trends towards greater transparency and to help scientists to fulfil their responsibilities as researchers and authors. We are therefore introducing small but important changes in our policies to reflect these goals.
In a previous Editorial (Nature 450, 1; 2007), we asked for feedback about whether we should require senior or corresponding authors to sign a statement that they had taken some specific 'integrity insurance' steps before the manuscript was submitted. Some applauded this idea, but most were not in favour. (Some of the feedback can be seen here.) Major doubts were expressed about the ability of corresponding authors to take on such responsibility given the diversity of collaborations. The belief was also expressed that such signed statements would too often be worthless box-ticking exercises. Although we regretfully accept these realities, we believe that we should go further in spelling out the responsibilities of co-authors, and in requiring an implicit acceptance of them.
Accordingly, we have modified the Nature journal policy on authorship, which is detailed on our website. For papers submitted by collaborations, we now delineate the responsibilities of the senior members of each collaboration group on the paper. Before submitting the paper, at least one senior member from each collaborating group must take responsibility for their group's contribution. Three major responsibilities are covered: preservation of the original data on which the paper is based, verification that the figures and conclusions accurately reflect the data collected and that manipulations to images are in accordance with Nature journal guidelines, and minimization of obstacles to sharing materials, data and algorithms through appropriate planning.
Corresponding authors have multiple responsibilities, but we now make it clearer that the author list should include all appropriate researchers and no others, and that the order has been agreed to by all authors. They are expected to have notified all authors when the manuscript was submitted, they are the point of contact with the editor and they must communicate any matters that arise after publication to their co-authors.
Another change is that we have strengthened our policy for statements of authors' contributions. This policy was first introduced nearly 10 years ago (Nature 399, 393; 1999) to make the credit due to individual co-authors more explicit. Since then, authors of Nature papers have had the opportunity to include in their papers a statement that details each author's role in the published work. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of authors who choose to include this has risen dramatically.
This acceptance, and discussions with authors who have chosen not to include such a statement, has led us to change our policy. Rather than 'strongly encouraging' such statements, we now require them for publication of original research papers in Nature and the Nature research journals. The detail provided can vary tremendously and authors are left to structure them as they see fit. We insist only that no author be left out.
To ensure that authors are familiar with these changes, we will shortly require the corresponding author to confirm that he or she has read the Nature journal policies on author responsibilities and is submitting the manuscript in accordance with those policies.

Nature journals' authorship policies.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 30, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (2)

A Nature News story this week (458, 130; 2009) reports that US President Barack Obama has directed the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to ensure scientific integrity in government decision-making.
The presidential memo calls for agencies to hire scientific employees based on their knowledge, and to put rules in place for scientific integrity and transparency along with protection for whistleblowers.
According to the Nature News story, Harold Varmus, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, says the memo would help prevent the kind of instances during the administration of George W. Bush when political appointees interfered with the workings of government scientists. "The intent is to prevent that kind of undermining of the science advisory process," he says. John Marburger, Bush's science adviser, wrote in an e-mail: "There's certainly nothing wrong with it, but I never believed such a memorandum was necessary. From the perspective of the Obama administration, it delivers on a campaign commitment."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 17, 2009
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Frank Gannon writes a stirring Editorial in EMBO Reports this month (10, 193; 2009) about scientists and the global economic crisis. " Hubris and recklessness", he writes, " together with an insatiable hunger for money, have created a global crisis that is driving many of the world's economies into recession. One result is rapidly increasing unemployment and fears are rising that pensions will be rendered worthless; yet, there is no sign of an end to this economic disaster, which has been happening 'on our watch'."

After summarizing the energy, climate, ecology and humanitarian crises now facing the world, Dr Gannon concludes that "scientists should have been the first to identify these problems and sound the bugle call for action. Indeed, some researchers did voice their concerns and published their analyses back when corrective action could have taken place without major disruption. But they did not galvanize their community, or their community ignored their message or presented contrary analyses; in any case, the scientific community failed. But, even the scientists who voiced their concerns early and proposed corrective measures were largely ignored by modern societies in which sound bites trump evidence and in which 'academic' has become synonymous with 'practically useless'.

There are major challenges ahead and business as usual is no longer good enough. There is an increasing need for courage in the scientific community to both speak up and propose measures, however unpopular in the short-term, to bring about systemic change. We, as scientists, also need to become politically engaged as experts in the political world, rather than poking fun at and ridiculing it. We need to talk to the public directly, convince them of the evidence and present possible solutions to get us out of this mess. More importantly though, it is a time to reflect on how we have contributed to the current system failure and what we can do to help society recover from it. It is still our watch and we can make change happen."

Additional material is in Nature's Recession Watch, providing analysis and advice on how to survive the global economic downturn. Science is key to nation-building during a recession but scientists must learn to convince politicians of the need to protect research budgets. Building global links and breaking down the barriers between disciplines is vital if the world is to weather the financial squeeze. Central banks must also end their obsession with cutting interest rates and technology start-ups will need to cut costs and sell what they can. A stimulus package for the developing world could, however, benefit everyone. Nature's news and opinion coverage of the dangers and opportunities keeps scientists updated on the recession and its impact on institutions, funding, and careers.

See also the March Editorial in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (16, 229; 2009), 'Stimulating Science', which argues that the economic benefits of biomedical research are recognized by governments around the world, but investment in science should go beyond profitability.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 11, 2009
Categories: Communication, Education, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scientists have been too dogmatic about scientific truth and sociologists have fostered too much scepticism — social scientists must now elect to put science back at the core of society, says Harry Collins, director of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge Expertise Science at Cardiff University, UK, in the 5 March edition of Nature (458, 30; 2009 – free to access online for a week). Prof Collins identifies three waves in the history of social science attitutes to scientific research: first, an attempt to understand and interpret it; second, scepticism about it; and third – well, third is what he says social scientists must now do – work out what is right about science, not just what is wrong. He writes:
"This third wave will be resisted. Post-modernists have become comfortable in their cocoon of cynicism. And some natural scientists have become too fond of describing their work as godlike. Others are ready to offer simple-minded criticisms of deeply held beliefs. But the third wave is needed to put science back in its proper place…..
Science’s findings are to be preferred over religion’s revealed truths, and are braver than the logic of scepticism, but they are not certain. They are a better grounding for society precisely, and only, because they are provisional. It is open debate among those with experience that is the ultimate value of the good society.
Science, then, can provide us with a set of values — not findings — for how to run our lives, and that includes our social and political lives. But it can do this only if we accept that assessing scientific findings is a far more difficult task than was once believed, and that those findings do not lead straight to political conclusions. Scientists can guide us only by admitting their weaknesses, and, concomitantly, when we outsiders judge scientists, we must do it not to the standard of truth, but to the much softer standard of expertise."
What do you think about whether, and how, social scientists and others should interpret the “values” of scientific research and “truth” to society at large? We welcome your views at the Nature Network forum hosted by Nature's Opinion editors.

Other current debates at the Nature Opinion forum at Nature Network:
'Untouchable' science.
Blogging: science, journalism or public discourse?
Brain, machine and in-between.
What you need to know, and what you can do for science, in the financial crisis.
Pruning the IRB tree.
Troubles with plastic.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 09, 2009
Categories: Communication, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Editorial in the March issue of Nature Immunology (10, 225; 2009) addresses the vexed question of plagiarism: what it is, and what funders are doing about it when it is discovered. From the Editorial:

Publishers, too, are taking steps to combat the rise of plagiarism and to protect the intellectual property rights of their authors. Internet-based search tools have been developed to detect potential cases of plagiarism. Online publication has also facilitated the creation of a textual database, called 'CrossRef', where published content can be deposited and annotated by various 'meta tags'. Nature Publishing Group and over 40 other publishers, as participating members of CrossRef, routinely deposit published papers into this database. In 2008, the developers of CrossRef also launched a service called CrossCheck, which uses the iThenticate Internet-based tool developed by iParadigms to compare a selected paper with the entire database to assess textual similarity. Akin to a search of a protein or nucleic acid database, textual similarity scores are reported after the search program is run, and the context of the similarity can be displayed so that the user (in this case, an editor) can further inspect those manuscripts deemed 'suspect'. The incorporation of such tools into the normal editorial workflow should help diminish the likelihood of plagiarism in manuscripts that might otherwise have passed peer review. Nature Publishing Group journals will be using this tool to scrutinize manuscripts selected for publication.
Still, the onus is on mentors and laboratory chiefs to serve as examples of good scientific conduct. They should initiate discussions about what constitutes plagiarism and 'self plagiarism', as well as other forms of misconduct, with their trainees. Mentors should recognize their obligation to help trainees to develop and hone good written communication skills that follow high ethical standards. Likewise, colleagues, referees and editors all must accept their responsibility to safeguard scientific literature against the possibility of plagiarism or dual publication. Scientific integrity includes the ability to acknowledge good ideas and to give proper credit due to original authors.

The Nature journals' policies on plagiarism are here.

The Nature journals' policies on duplicate publication are here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 25, 2009
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to an online News story at the Nature website (doi 10.1038/news.2009.99; 16 February), The Swedish Research Council is becoming involved in a row over academic freedom after a peer-reviewed journal removed a published paper — by two Swedish academics — from its website following a threat of legal action from the company whose technology the research criticized. The News story describes how the paper 'Charlatanry in forensic speech science: a problem to be taken seriously', was first published in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law in December 2007. In it, the authors examine voice-analysis technologies, stating there is no scientific basis for one of them. Lawyers for the manufacturers complained and the paper was removed from the journal website (the abstract and an explanatory note from the editors remain). Several members of the Swedish Research Council have signed an expression of concern about the removal, which according to the journal was for reasons of possible defamation rather than for any problem with the accuracy of the scientific content.
We welcome your comments, here or at the Nature News website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 23, 2009
Categories: Ethics, Publishing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mauno Vihinen of the University of Tampere, Finland, issued a warning about plagiarism-detection systems in Nature's Correspondence pages recently (Nature 457, 26; 2009):
Sophisticated tools have been developed to detect duplicate publication and plagiarism, as noted in M. Errani and H. Garner's Commentary 'A tale of two citations' (Nature 451, 397–399; 2008) and in your News story 'Entire-paper plagiarism caught by software' (Nature 455, 715; 2008). To my surprise, one of these tools, Déjà vu, classifies four of our publications as unverified duplicates. These report the analysis of Bruton's tyrosine kinase mutations associated with the rare disease X-linked agammaglobulinaemia (XLA) and of the database BTKbase.
Each of these is a genuinely different and independent report; they cover the development of the database and different analyses of the growing data set. The reason why they are branded as suspect cases is probably that the journal Nucleic Acids Research, in which three of them were published, has a special format for articles in their annual database issue.
Between 1995 and 2006, we published eight articles on BTKbase. The number of XLA cases recorded in the database has grown from 118 to 1,111 during this period. Several colleagues who maintain databases are also listed in Déjà vu. It is worrying that such legitimate articles written by research infrastructure developers and providers are labelled as unethical, just because of some overlap with previous papers as a result of a journal's strict formatting requirement.
Detection of fraud, including duplications, is obviously crucial to the integrity of science. But it is unethical to list thousands of scientists in a public Internet service as suspects, without verifying the claims that are being made. Although the developers indicate that the data are provisional, there is still a risk that the listing will affect decisions on careers, promotions or research funding if individual cases are not investigated.
No professional scientist wants even the slightest suspicion of fraud to tarnish their scholarly reputation, so listed cases need to be closely investigated. To detect real duplicates, the full-length articles must be analysed, not just the abstracts — which occurred in the case of our publications.
The Nature journals' policies on plagiarism.
Nature journals' policies on publication ethics.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 21, 2009
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a growing trend to take prescription stimulants (Adderall and Ritalin for example) in order to enhance cognitive performance – perhaps in attempt to obtain better grades or increase learning capacity. Nature has been reporting on developments in this controversial area and providing a forum for discussion. In a Commentary article (Nature doi:10.1038/456702a; 7 December 2008 - free to access online until 18 December) Henry Greely and co-authors, who include Philip Campbell, Editor in Chief of Nature, say that society must respond to this demand. The authors call for:
--a presumption that adults should be able to use drugs for this purpose
--an evidence-based approach to evaluate the risks and benefits
--legal and ethical policies to ensure fair and equitable use
--a research programme
--broadly available information about risks and benefits
Do you agree with the authors that new methods of improving our brain function should be welcomed, to improve quality of life and extend lifespans? Will safe and effective cognitive enhancers benefit the individual and society? Or should these drugs remain illegal for these purposes? A range of opinions is expressed in a lively Nature Network discussion. One example: "Not only would the rich continue to get richer and healthier, but they’d have the ability to get “smarter” as well. If we’re not careful, we won’t only end up with further social stratification— we’ll see speciation!" Another: " I do agree with the authors that the topic will not disappear, and needs to be confronted. I do not pretend to know what policies are best....As a scientist I do not relish my peers or younger colleagues taking such drugs for the extra edge in career success. I do not relish getting “confidential” advice from a tenure review committee member that next time I should try taking a daily dose of X." And another example: "The majority of mind-altering drugs discovered by humanity have side effects of one form or another. I would be very wary of using any of the current family of available drugs on a long term basis. In which case the call for evidence-based research in the Nature piece will have not inconsiderable ethical issues. These would presumably need to be both double blind and long term."
Please join the Nature Network forum discussion and add your own views to questions such as "why? What’s wrong with leaving your good old brain to do its thing without enhancement?" Previous Nature Network discussion responding to the question ‘would you boost your brain power?’, based on an earlier Commentary article by some of the same authors, can be found here, and the results of Nature's reader survey on the use of neuroenhancing drugs can be read and analysed here.
Initial media reports about the Nature Commentary's proposals are summarized at The Great Beyond, in which Philip Campbell is quoted as stating: “The article, while libertarian in spirit, is absolutely not saying: ‘use these drugs, everybody’. My advice is to avoid taking such drugs unless you have been prescribed them. It is a serious felony to sell such drugs off-prescription in the US; in the UK, Ritalin, for example, is a class B drug, so that un-prescribed possession is punishable by prison and a fine. Furthermore, these drugs have undergone no clinical trials for use by healthy people. And they do have side-effects.”

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 10, 2008
Categories: Education, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Frank Gannon writes an Editorial in the November EMBO Reports (9, 1055; 2008) about the importance of molecular biology to energy research. From the Editorial:
"Despite appearances, this is not an editorial about politics. It is about how biologists—more specifically, molecular biologists—can contribute to solving these problems. The obvious first step is to make energy production and conservation a prime focus of research, placing it on the same pedestal as curing cancer or developing therapies for HIV/AIDS and malaria. In fact, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels while preserving the environment might arguably be more important than other essential causes; an increasingly uninhabitable planet will affect both current and future generations, not only those who suffer from disease today.
We must therefore revisit our attitude towards certain avenues of research and accept that some of the solutions can only come from molecular biology. For example, after a brief period of enthusiasm, biofuels are now in the 'bad books' for various reasons, but mostly because their increasing production and the associated tax benefits are having an impact on the cost and availability of staple foods. Of course, sustainable food production is another important challenge that requires more research; yet, biologists could engineer energy crops to grow in poor soils and in harsh environments where it does not make sense to grow food crops. I suspect that such crops would eventually be welcomed even if they were genetically engineered. Similarly, we could also invest more into studying natural processes such as photosynthesis; bio-mimicry might help us to engineer more efficient ways for converting sunlight into energy."
Molecular biologists are going to face the problems of an ill-prepared scientific community at a time when the public increasingly expects science to solve our current energy and environmental problems, concludes Gannon. "This is complicated further by public skepticism about the science such solutions will require. Clearly, molecular biologists have to focus their attention on this huge challenge; it is no longer a question of 'if we should' but one of 'how we must'."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 12, 2008
Categories: Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

When a research council in the UK consulted the public about different aspects of nanomedicine, the feedback was loud and clear, as Richard Jones reports for Nature Nanotechnology (3, 578 - 579; 2008). "Given the breadth, and the diffuseness, of nanotechnology as a field, and the wide range of potential impacts it might have, it has sometimes been difficult to maintain a focus and to find issues that people can get a purchase on, with the result that the recommendations can end up seeming, to some, disappointingly generic. In any case, the complex and decentralized nature of scientific decision-making sometimes makes it difficult to see how these deliberations actually make a concrete difference on policy. The results of a new public engagement exercise on the subject of nanotechnology for healthcare, carried out in the UK, directly address some of these criticisms and offer surprising and enlightening insights into potential public reactions to some of the predicted applications of nanotechnology in medicine".
But, asks Richard Jones, "what about broader worries concerning tensions between the involvement of the public in decision-making in science policy and the principle of the autonomy of the scientific enterprise? One answer, of course, is that it is right in principle that the public has a voice in the direction of an activity that involves considerable amounts of taxpayers' money, and that these exercises may help provide some public legitimacy for potentially controversial areas of science. The more provocative suggestion is that in an applied field like nanomedicine, taking the results of public engagement seriously may lead to significantly better decision-making. This is the proposition that now needs testing."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 27, 2008
Categories: Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Medicine (14, 1006 - 1007; 2008) features a question and answer session with Senator Charles Grassley. "What would a trim 75-year-old grain farmer have to say about drug safety and the payments given to medical researchers by drug companies? Lots, if he happens to be Charles Grassley, who has represented the state of Iowa in the US Senate since 1980. As the senior Republican on the Senate's finance and judiciary committees, he has carved out a role as a relentless watchdog who acts as a magnet for whistleblowers in government agencies ranging from the US Department of Defense to the FBI. In the last several years, Grassley has set his investigative sights on issues relating to medicine. A leading critic of the Food and Drug Administration since the surprise withdrawal from the market of Merck's painkiller Vioxx in 2004, Grassley is now focusing on university researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health who haven't been properly reporting income from drug companies. Meredith Wadman asked the senator what he hopes to achieve through his investigations." Read on, at Nature Medicine.

Sen Grassley's congressional investigation allegeing that some researchers have failed to report all the drug-company money that they have received — and that universities may have been too slow to police them is also subject of the leading Editorial in the current issue of Nature (Nature 455, 835; 16 October 2008, free to access online). A string of internal Emory University documents and e-mails made public last week after a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Finance, chaired by Sen Grassley, allege a web of consulting, lecturing and advisory-board relationships that Charles Nemeroff, chair of the psychiatry department at the University maintained with 16 pharmaceutical companies. According to Nature, Nemeroff is the seventh academic psychiatrist this year that Grassley has exposed as allegedly underreporting drug-company income. His office says that there are more revelations to come. Grassley has begun pressuring the NIH to mete out real punishment — as in pulling grants — to spur institutions to enforce proper reporting. Sen Grassley’s plan to make companies disclose in a publicly accessible database all payments of more than $500 that they make to physicians, and whether this would make it easier for universties to report such payments, is open for debate at the Nature Network Opinion forum.

Researchers and their institutions need to dispel a myth about 'independent' research before the media does it for them, according to the latest Nature Biotechnology Editorial (26, 1051; 2008). The great unspoken reality is that relationships between companies and researchers are not only becoming the norm, but they are also essential for medicine to progress. Without the exchange of expertise and knowledge between industry and academia, much of medical progress would falter.
This truth remains unspoken because researchers and their institutions like to maintain an aura of lily-white independence from the commercial world. Researchers may feel, and they may be absolutely right, that allowing companies to contribute to payments for trials or research or publications does not threaten their independence of thought or action.
However, that is not how the general public or individual patients see 'independence'. For them, independence implies no financial ties, no associations, not a smidgeon of influence from commercial interests. This wholly unrealistic view of angelic independence is an impression that the academic world has fostered, if not actively, then at least through a persistent failure to counter it. And it is this view that the Sunshine Act and its database will blow wide open once and for all.
The way to prevent a public and media backlash is for physicians and researchers (and their institutions) to take immediate and active steps now to explain the interdependence of industrial and academic research. It must be the biomedical community that says "we have to talk to these companies" and "their money really helps push medicine forward." We need to make plain that there can be a win-win-win outcome for doctors, companies and patients alike. That will give patients a better view of the integrated worlds of research and commerce within healthcare and disarm a million trivial investigations based on nothing more than administrative discrepancies.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 20, 2008
Categories: Competing interests, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the text of an Editorial in Nature (455, 708; 9 October 2008), concluding that proprietary data formats may be legally defensible but open standards can be a better spur for innovation.

"A historian of science and computing, and a scholar whose PhD thesis was on "professionalization of cooking among domestic servants in eighteenth-century France", might seem unlikely characters to find at the centre of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. But that is exactly what has happened in the suit brought against George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, Virginia, by Thomson Reuters, the company probably best known for its ISI science indicators.
Dan Cohen, director of GMU's Center for History and New Media, and Sean Takats, a GMU history professor, are also directors of Zotero: open-source software developed by the history centre that lets researchers organize and share their digital information iTunes style, whether it is in the form of citations, documents or web pages. Zotero is free and popular, and has attracted some 1 million downloads since its launch in October 2006.
Thomson makes the proprietary bibliography software EndNote, and claims that Zotero is causing its commercial business "irreparable harm" and is wilfully and intentionally destroying Thomson's customer base. In particular, Thomson is demanding that GMU stop distributing the newer beta-version of Zotero that allegedly allows EndNote's proprietary data format for storing journal citation styles to be converted into an open-standard format readable by Zotero and other software. Thomson claims that Zotero "reverse engineered or decompiled" not only the format, but also the EndNote software itself.
The company is seeking a minimum of US$10 million in damages annually until GMU halts distribution of Zotero's new feature. It also demands that GMU "terminate" the ability of each Zotero user to use or distribute any open-source files converted from EndNote's own data format. GMU seems ready to fight the suit; a spokesperson told Nature that the university believes it is "well within its rights", but declined to go into further detail given the ongoing litigation. Thomson was contacted but declined to comment, saying: "It is the policy of Thomson Reuters that we do not comment on pending litigation."

Continue reading "Nature editorial on Zotero v Thomson Reuters" »

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 15, 2008
Categories: Ethics, Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (0)

Frank Gannon, in his October editorial for EMBO Reports (9, 937; 2008) identifies bullying as a pervasive problem in academic research, which scientists seem to accept "without further comment or disapproval as though it were a normal part of life." From bullying of junior scientists (PhD students) or of peers, to defending accusations of dishonesty, Gannon provides a host of situations in which he believes this behaviour is rampant. He writes: "the reaction of some scientists when their grant application or submission is rejected can be downright disgraceful. If they know that they are dealing with more junior people, they will emphasize that they are the expert and that the decision should not rest with 'some ignorant editor' who is not a 'real scientist' anyway. They will ridicule the referees who critically analysed their work; they will persist, bully and coerce until they get beyond the initial rejection."...
..."I might be exaggerating the extent and seriousness of bullying in academic science, but its existence is undeniable. Science certainly needs a degree of competition and is genuinely driven by the incentive to be the first to discover; we are a competitive species after all. Nonetheless, we should consider the damage we inflict on one another and on research itself if we tolerate bullying. Academic science needs all types of characters; not only the dominant and aggressive ones, but also the pensive and quiet workers. More importantly, scientific research flourishes best in an environment characterized by mutual respect, tolerance and support, and where bullying has no place."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 06, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

An increasing research trend is to pool collections of biological samples in international scientific studies, thereby amplifying their potential scientific value. The pooling of samples in such 'biobanks' poses several ethical and legal challenges, which various authors have attempted to meet by proposing guidelines for researchers (see G. Helgesson et al. Nature Biotechnol. 25, 973-976; 2007). One suggestion made by these authors is that "when the study is not particularly sensitive, and on the condition that (i) strict coding procedures are maintained, (ii) secrecy laws apply to any handling of sensitive information and (iii) vital research interests are at stake ...that genetic analyses of identifiable samples should be permitted without (new) consent."
Bjørn M Hofmann takes issue with this view in the September issue of Nature Biotechnology (26, 979-980; 2008), arguing that the earlier proposals would be "detrimental to the public's trust". He writes: "If one applies a lax interpretation of "not particularly sensitive" research, any study can be justified as long as it serves research interests. Their lax interpretation of consent to "future cancer research" as being consent to any kind of future research endorses this. For the above reasons, instead of minimizing risk to research participants, the framework they suggest actually enhances the risk by not addressing basic challenges with biobank research."
In the same issue of the journal (Nature Biotechnol. 26, 980-981; 2008), Helgesson replies that there is no risk of direct physical harm to research subjects once biobank samples have been collected, because "a core characteristic of biobank research is that it is the inappropriate distribution of information that has a potential to harm research subjects. This is why we stressed the importance of strict routines for coding, storage and use of biobank samples and related data as the first central feature of our ethical framework for research on previously collected samples."
The core of the debate is the fact that "some people might be included in biobank research who would have said no if they had been informed and asked", writes Helgesson. Although it is important to exclude people who do not wish to participate, excessively cautious informed-consent procedures might cause many more peple to drop out and hence to reduce the quality of the research.
Further information: World Medical Association Helsinki Declaration on ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects.
The Nature journals' policies on these topics are here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 16, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The September Editorial in Nature Medicine (14, 891; 2008) addresses the difficulty of monitoring biosecurity research, in the context of the increase in biosecurity spending in the US to $41 billion per year, almost ten times larger than the amount spent before 9 September 2001. In the wake of the Bruce Ivins affair, the Editorial notes that a consequence of the increased funds available for biodefense is that there are now so many people working in this field (perhaps 14,000 individuals) that monitoring their activities is not adequate. From the Editorial:

Aiming to fill this void, the BWC [biological weapon convention] countries have held annual meetings since 2003 to promote "common understanding and effective action" on a series of biosecurity issues agreed upon in advance. For example, as this issue of Nature Medicine went to press, the 2008 meeting was taking place in Geneva, with a focus on measures to promote biosafety and on oversight, education and development of codes of conduct to prevent misuse of advances in biotechnology. Regrettably, again at the insistence of the US, the participants of these annual meetings do not have decision-making authority, raising serious doubts about their real influence. Deciding on the right level of regulation for dual-use research, both at the national and international levels, is a difficult problem. Scientists should continue to get involved in the decision-making progress to make sure that their point of view is heard until clear guidelines are in place. If the outcome of this domestic discussion is successful, it may provide a blueprint for a global regulatory scheme—a sorely needed opportunity for the US to lead by example.

See also a related News story in the same issue of the journal Nature Medicine 14, 893 (2008).
The Nature journals' policy on biosecurity is here, with links to associated (free to access) Editorials providing context for the policy.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 15, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The use of model organisms in research will continue despite their shortcomings, writes Philip Hunter in the September issue of EMBO Reports (9, 717-720; 2008). From his article:

During the 1940s and 1950s, in the early days of molecular biology, biologists tackled the enormous problem of explaining how cells work at the molecular level by applying the tried and tested tools of reductionism. They reduced the complexity of the task in two ways: they focused on a few central molecular mechanisms—replication, transcription, protein synthesis and the control of gene activity—and they chose to use the simplest organisms—bacteria and bacteriophages—in which to study these phenomena. Over time and with more knowledge to hand, biological research expanded to the study of more complex systems, which required the increasing use of higher organisms, including Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila, Arabidopsis, zebrafish and rodents.
These model organisms became the irreplaceable tools of fundamental biological and clinical research, and helped scientists to amass an enormous amount of knowledge. However, several high-profile clinical trials in which the use of model organisms failed to predict the serious side effects of some drugs, coupled with the prospect of using human stem-cell lines in trials and the growing sophistication of in silico methods, have all cast doubt on the future use of model organisms. This is the case at least for research into human diseases, which, after all, drives much of the research in molecular biology.
Animal rights activists have seized on this argument, but show little interest in appreciating the huge contribution that model organisms have made to molecular biology. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that research on animals has taught us nearly all we know about cell biology—be it transcriptional control, RNA quality control or the structure of chromatin.

See also the News Feature in Nature 454, 682-685 (2008), which reports on questions raised about the appropriateness of mouse and other animal models in some neurodegenerative diseases.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 09, 2008
Categories: Animal experiments, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article in the September issue of EMBO Reports (9, 709-713; 2008), Bart Penders, Klasien Horstman and Rein Vos of Maastricht University propose "crafting a new profession at the intersection of science and society". They write that "the new field of research into the ethical, legal and social aspects of scientific and technological developments (ELSA) is rapidly becoming a professional field with grants, research programmes and university departments devoted to it." Can ELSA succeed in reacquainting science with society, and the natural sciences with the humanities and the social sciences when, according to these authors, previous attempts have failed? The authors argue that both natural scientists and social scientists are keen to bridge the gap that exists between their respective approaches, but conclude that "only time will tell" if these new attempts will be successful.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 02, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

This Editorial appears in Nature 454, 917-918; 21 August 2008:
The academic community in Austria often seems to be a closed, elite set, especially in the sphere of medicine. The power and influence wielded by a professor are hard to understand from the outside, and the rigid hierarchy of the academic system has been hard to dismantle from the inside, despite reformers' best efforts.
The upper echelons of that community also seem to know how to close ranks. Witness an example now threatening to emerge from the Medical University of Innsbruck, where there are worrying signs that investigations into a scandal of unprecedented dimensions in this small country may be thwarted.
According to a report from the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety, a urologist at the university, Hannes Strasser, has conducted a high-profile clinical trial so inappropriately that it must be considered entirely invalid (see page 922). Moreover, that trial represents just a fraction of the total number of patients who paid handsomely for the stem-cell treatment for urinary incontinence without knowing it was experimental.
Strasser's department chair, Georg Bartsch, insists that he has no connection with, and no responsibility for, the scandal — despite having 'honorary authorship' on all the relevant papers, a practice that contravenes the university's code of practice. And Strasser himself has written an open letter to university authorities denying any wrongdoing. (See also his Correspondence to Nature, 453, 1177; 2008.)

Continue reading "Research misconduct in Austria" »

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 21, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature News (454, 150; 2008): A former Texas official is suing the state's education agency, saying that its policies passively endorse creationism.
In a complaint filed with a district court on 1 July, Christina Comer, a former director of state science education, alleged that officials tacitly condone the teaching of creationism through a policy of neutrality. Comer oversaw Texas's science curriculum until last November, when she was forced to resign for circulating a notice of a talk entitled “Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse”. In her termination notice, Comer was told that the education agency endeavoured to “remain neutral” on the issue of creationism.
Comer's complaint argues that board neutrality violates the separation of church and state. She is also seeking reinstatement to her former position.
There are many online comments to this brief news item, perhaps typified by this one: "Many have been waiting for Chris to challenge this arcane move towards theocracy. Texas science education needs those like her whose efforts will keep our state and our country competitive in the twenty-first century. Dr. Timothy Henry Former Director of Judging Texas Science & Engineering Fair."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 04, 2008
Categories: Communication, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature 453, 969 (2008) :

Postdoctoral fellow Kristin Roovers was suspended after learning that she had manipulated and falsified data published in several papers. Roovers was hired by the institute in 2005. But in July 2007, the US Office of Research Integrity concluded that Roovers, while a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, had manipulated 19 panels of western blot data. She had used Photoshop to copy a set of bands and paste them into other blots representing data from different experiments. The data ultimately appeared in 11 figures in three publications.
Two of the papers (K. Roovers and R. K. Assoian Mol. Cell. Biol. 23, 4283–4294; 2003, and K. Roovers et al. Dev. Cell 5, 273–284; 2003) have been retracted. A decision on the third (C. F. Welsh et al. Nature Cell Biol. 3, 950–957; 2001) is pending. The Office of Research Integrity barred Roovers from receiving any US government grants for five years.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 29, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature 454; 150 (10 July 2008):
The US government may soon require, rather than just recommend, that federally funded investigators, and the ethics-board members who approve their research, receive training and education in how to protect participants in human studies.
The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) announced last week that it is soliciting comments on whether such training in research ethics should be mandatory — and asking for estimates of what this would cost grantee institutions.
“Over the past several years, OHRP has identified serious, systemic noncompliance with the requirements … for the protection of human subjects at a significant number of major institutions,” OHRP regulators wrote in its Federal Register announcement on 1 July.
Interested parties now have until 29 September to submit their comments.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 10, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The retraction of a Nature Chemical Biology paper is a step toward a full accounting of a case of scientific misconduct, as described in the journal's July editorial (4, 381; 2008).The paper is by Won et al., "Small molecule–based reversible reprogramming of cellular lifespan" (Nat. Chem. Biol. 2, 369–374, 2006). The editorial describes the process by which the paper was considered and the process by which the problems came to light, first involving undeclared financial interests, then, some time later, lack of reproducibility of the data. From the editorial:

As stated in the retraction text, all nine of the paper's authors have agreed that the paper must be retracted. However, Tae Kook Kim, the principal investigator and corresponding author, did not agree to the retraction statement signed by the other authors and asserts that any scientific irregularities are limited to a subset of the paper's experiments. Although circumstances did not allow complete agreement among the paper's authors and the text does not list all of the scientific concerns that were raised in the initial inquiries, the published retraction statement and 'Editor's note' provide abundant explanation for why the paper must be removed from the scientific literature. We commend CGK scientists for raising the initial concerns with the Science and Nature Chemical Biology papers and the KAIST investigating committees for their efforts to date. It is reassuring that Korean institutions are taking a hard line on scientific misconduct. However, we do question the timing and content of the KAIST press release of February 29, 2008, which was made public without advance notice to the journal. It is not unusual for an institute to announce that an investigation is underway and to make another announcement at its conclusion. Ideally, though, investigating committees contact journals well in advance of making public statements, thereby ensuring that the information communicated is accurate at all stages. The potential negative impacts of scientific misconduct allegations on the accused and on the public perception of science cannot be underestimated. Statements to the press are useful, but first priorities should always be determining the facts quickly, giving due process to investigators under suspicion and correcting the literature.........As the KAIST committee completes its deliberations, we urge them to provide a full accounting of the case and make their findings widely available in English. This example would serve as a model for future investigations committed to maintaining the integrity of science and the scientific literature.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 26, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the text of an Editorial published in Nature on 19 June (453, 957; 2008)

Many researchers would like to believe that scientific misconduct is very rare. But news reported in this issue (see page 969), and the survey results reported by Sandra Titus and her colleagues in the Commentary on page 980, challenge that comfortable assumption. Titus's team found that almost 9% of the respondents in their survey, mainly biomedical scientists, had witnessed some form of scientific misconduct in the past three years, and that 37% of those incidents went unreported.
The results suggest a research climate in which scientific misconduct, although uncommon, is certainly not an anomaly. Titus et al. outline a number of measures to address this situation, including better protection for whistleblowers, and promotion of a 'zero tolerance' culture in which scientists have just as much responsibility to report others' misconduct as they have for their own behaviour.

Continue reading "Solutions, not scapegoats" »

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 23, 2008
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The Chronicle of Higher Education (29 May 2008) has published an article by Jeffrey R. Young about image "beautification", or to put it more bluntly, "fakery", in papers reporting research results. The article describes the discovery of "doctored" images by editors at the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and outlines some of the processes that it and other journals have put in place to uncover the practice, complete with some case-histories. All papers accepted for publication by the Journal of Cell Biology, for example, are subjected to an image check. Dr Linda Miller, US Executive Editor of Nature, was interviewed for the Chronicle's article:

At Nature Publishing Group, which produces some of the world's leading science journals, image guidelines were developed in 2006, and last year the company's research journals began checking two randomly selected papers in each issue for image tampering, says Linda J. Miller, U.S. executive editor of Nature and the Nature Publishing Group's research journals. So far no article has been rejected as a result of the checking, she says. Ms. Miller and other editors say that in most cases of image tampering, scientists intend to beautify their figures rather than lie about their findings. In one case, an author notified the journal that a scientist working in his lab had gone too far in trying to make figures look clean. The journal determined that the conclusions were sound, but "they wound up having to print a huge correction, and this was quite embarrassing for the authors," she says. Ms. Miller wrote an editorial for Nature stressing that scientists should present their images without alterations, rather than thinking polished images will help them get published. Many images are of gels, which are ways to detect proteins or other molecules in a sample, and often they are blurry. No matter, says Ms. Miller. "We like dirt—not all gels run perfectly," she says. "Beautification is not necessary. If your data is solid, it shines through."

Nature journals' image guidelines can be found here. Also on this page are links to free-access editorials in the Nature journals about our policies and why we have them, together with an invitation to authors and other scientists to comment online.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 19, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature 453, 145 (8 May2008):
A researcher who blew the whistle over animal-rights issues at the University of Nevada in Reno went to court last week to try to win his job back after being fired.
Nutrition researcher Hussein Hussein, a tenured professor, was sacked last month by university president Milton Glick, despite a recommendation by a university administrative hearing that he merely be reprimanded or demoted. Four years ago, Hussein reported deficiencies in the care of laboratory animals that led to US$11,400 in fines against the university. He claims the university sought to fire him in retaliation.
After the administrative hearing, he was cleared of charges of plagiarizing graduate student work, but found to have incorrectly reported on $377,000 in grants, thus denying the university overhead costs.
Hussein's lawyer asked a Nevada judge to reinstate him, arguing that he was improperly fired. A spokeswoman says the university acted appropriately, and will vigorously defend its actions.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 13, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sherry Towers, a particle physicist who is now a statistician, reports a study using public databases to study the career paths of 57 former postdoctoral researchers from Fermilab who worked on the Run II Dzero experiment to examine if males and females were treated in a gender-blind fashion on the experiment. Dr Towers's results are highlighted in a Nature news story this week (23 April 2008) .
Female researchers were on average significantly more productive compared to their male peers, yet were allocated only one-third the amount of conference presentations based on their productivity. The study also finds that the dramatic gender bias in allocation of conference presentations appeared to have significant negative impact on the academic career advancement of the females.
Nature contacted some physicists to ask them their views. Some are sceptical, arguing for example that one of the criteria used in the study, internal papers, are not necessarily a direct measure of productivity, and that the small number of physicists surveyed is not enough to prove systematic bias. But even those expressing scepticism do not doubt that females suffer gender discrimination. Several female physicists contacted by Nature said Towers's data matched their personal experiences of institutional sexism in physics. According to the news story, Fermilab did undertake a review of its policies after the complaints of gender bias.
Various points of view are expressed in the comment thread to the Nature story, to which you are welcome to add your experiences and/or views.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 24, 2008
Categories: Careers, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The eternal question of authorship is in the frame in a News story in the current issue of Nature (452, 791; 2008), in which it is reported that thousands of of documents relating to Merck’s withdrawn painkiller rofecoxib (Vioxx) were were reviewed by medical researchers, and seem to show Merck’s extensive involvement in ghost-writing and ‘guest authorship’ of research and review papers. The results of the analysis are published by J. Ross et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association (299, 1800–1812; 2008).
By omitting the names — or downgrading the involvement — of drug-industry writers, and adding the names of academics who were not substantially involved in a paper, the industry’s role in research may be concealed. And doctors may be misled over the independence of the work. For example, one of the Merck-held documents lists a number of clinical trials in which a Merck employee is to be author of the first draft of a manuscript. However, when these trials were published, in 16 of 20 of the articles an external academic is listed as first author. Merck denies these allegations.
See also Spoonful of Medicine, the blog of Nature Medicine.
There is further discussion of the JAMA article, and the implications for authorship credit, at Nature Network.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 21, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a Commentary in this week’s Nature (452, 686-687; 2008), Christine Boesz and Nigel Lloyd of the OECD propose a practical framework for examining misconduct allegations in multinational scientific teams: it is imperative, they argue, for researchers in cross-boarder collaborations to be held accountable for the integrity of their work. In the same issue of the journal, a related Editorial (Nature 452, 665; 2008) and News Feature (Nature 452, 682-684; 2008) also explore collaborations: what makes them fail and how they can work better.
Do you know of international misconduct-related documents that could inform the templates the OECD hopes to produce? Have you encountered relevant situations or challenges while conducting research with scientists from other countries? How were these situations resolved? We invite you to provide your views and experiences at the Nature Network News and Opinion forum.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 10, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

An Institute of Medicine report recommends that the United States government create a programme to provide consistent guidelines for clinical interventions. The reliability of the guidelines will depend on the availability of the clinical data to be assessed, according to this month's (March 2008) Editorial in Nature Medicine (14, 223; 2008).
The problem is that "Widespread regional variation in how health care providers treat some conditions in the United States reflects the sobering fact that, for many interventions, there is no consensus about what constitutes effective clinical care. Physicians and health care providers must try to make sense of innumerable and conflicting guidelines in order to choose the best available intervention for their patient. Scientific, systematic review of data from medical literature and clinical trials is crucial to forming a reliable evidence base of what actually works in health care. With this in mind, professional medical organizations, patient advocacy groups, government agencies and others have synthesized available data on the efficacy of particular interventions and have produced guidelines recommending certain courses of action for specific conditions. The problem is that there is no consensus among the approaches to systematic review, and, more troublesome, no clear understanding of the best methods for assessing the evidence."
The Institute of Medicine has stepped in to recommend a plan to help resolve conflicting medical advice (reported in a news story at Nature Medicine 14, 226; 2008) by three methods: first, identify interventions that are priorities for evaluation; second, develop standardized and reliable methods for performing systematic reviews of all the available data about a given intervention; and third, develop standards for producing clinical guidelines. The Editorial discusses some of the practical difficulties, concluding that the Institute of Medicine report is an important step forward but will require legislation if it is to work.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 13, 2008
Categories: Data availability, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Commentary in the current issue of Nature by Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, A tale of two citations (Nature 451, 397-399;2008), has predictably received a lot of attention. In a nutshell, the authors ask whether scientists are publishing more duplicate papers, and by their newly devised, automated search of seven million biomedical abstracts, provide the answer that yes, they are.
At the Nature Precedings forum on Nature Network, for example, Hilary Spencer wonders whether posting one’s paper on a preprint server, which has been suggested as one possible check/balance in the system, may rather "facilitate the very plagiarism that it can help to later detect. For many authors, this is a legitimate fear in today’s cut-and-paste climate. Is the risk (of facilitating plagiarism) worth the benefit (of facilitating detection)?" A systematic check by journals of their submitted papers against preprint servers for plaigiarism would be needed if Hilary's suggestion has any foundation (see this Nautilus post for details of an earlier scandal along these lines). Such a check, of course, would be another cost to the publisher of the journal before a research paper could be published.
At the Publishing in the New Millennium forum, also at Nature Network, there is an informed and passionate debate among the scientists in the group about whether more duplicate papers are being published in their fields; whether there are legitimate reasons to publish similar versions of the same paper in different journals; and if there is a problem, how it can be stemmed.
Martin Fenner writes about the issue on his blog, Gobbledygook, and from this post links to some other blog discussion arising from the Commentary. There is another post here, on Nascent (NPG's web publishing department blog) by Euan Adie, which refers to the plagiarism-detection software Cross Check.
In the middle of all the heated discussion, it is worth bearing in mind the policy advice that the Nature journals provide for authors and potential authors who would like guidance for how we, the editors, see this issue. So please see our author and reviewers' website for our polices on: plagiarism, fabrication and due credit for unpublished data; duplicate publication; authorship in general; and confidentiality/pre-publicity. We hope that these policies provide clear and helpful guidance. Authors and potential authors wishing more details can find links to relevant, free-access, journal editorials on each of these pages. Feedback and suggestions are welcome, either as comments to this post or via email.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 28, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ron A. Bouchard of the University of Alberta, and Trudo Lemmens of the University of Toronto, write in a Commentary in this month's Nature Biotechnology (Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 31-36; 2008) that the allocation of risks and benefits of publicly sponsored biomedical research is becoming increasingly skewed toward for-profit entities and against the public interest. A legitimate solution to this imbalance would be to levy compulsory government royalty fees on commercial products made possible by public efforts.
The authors argue that "public–private partnerships can be particularly valuable in circumstances involving large transaction costs associated with novel biomedical inventions aimed at the global public good. That said, a combination of self-interest and anxiety in the face of globalization has led to wide swings of the pendulum of S&T policy and scholarship in recent years, with argument for expansive IPR rights on the one hand and their abolition in favor of a completely open source model on the other. Neither position is likely to be balanced or workable over the long term, as both may skew too far to private or public interests." A compulsory government royalty on technologies commercialized using public money, they argue in their Commentary, is a necessary 'third way' to protect the interests of for-profit entities and those of the public.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 18, 2008
Categories: Data availability, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two scientists writing a Commentary article, "Professor's little helper", in the current (20 December) issue of Nature (450, 1157-1159; 2007) want to stimulate your brains – in more ways than one.
Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir from the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge University argue that the increased usage of brain-boosting drugs by ill and healthy individuals raises ethical questions that cannot be ignored. An informal questionnaire Sahakian and Morein-Zamir sent to some of their scientific colleagues in the United States and United Kingdom revealed fairly casual use by academics, and we now want to hear your views on the topic.
The authors' arguments can be read in more detail in their Commentary at Nature (450, 1157-1159; 2007). A Nature editorial in the 15 November issue (Nature 450, 320; 2007) also discussed some of the ethical issues surrounding drug-based enhancement in healthy individuals inspired by a longer discussion paper from the British Medical Association.
To trigger broader discussion of these issues Sahakian and Morein-Zamir propose the following questions:
> Should adults with severe memory and concentration problems be given cognitive enhancing drugs?
> If such drugs have only mild side effects, should they be prescribed more widely for other psychiatric disorders?
> Do the same arguments apply for young children and adolescents with neuropsychiatric disorders, such as those suffering from ADHD?
> Would you boost your own brain power?
> How would you react if you knew your colleagues – or your students – were taking cognitive enhancers?
> How should society react?
Please contribute to this online discussion. We especially want to hear from you if you’re already using these drugs – or if you know people who are. What are your reasons for taking, or not taking, them?
For the next two weeks, the authors of the Nature Commentary will be joining in the conversation at the Nature Network forum: we look forward to meeting you there.
See also the related post, Brain doping, over at Action Potential.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 20, 2007
Categories: Disciplines, Education, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature's obituary of Leslie Orgel (1927–2007) :

Although Orgel was a theoretician, he always demanded that theory be subject to rigorous experimental validation. This, he felt, was especially true in the field of the origins of life, where "theories are a dime a dozen and facts are in short supply". He took great pleasure in a positive result, to the point of rooting for the pen on a graph-plotter during chromatography experiments. But he also delighted in negative results, because they pushed him to devise new hypotheses. This, of course, is the way scientists are supposed to behave, but Orgel was one of the few who actually did so.

The full obituary, by Gerald F. Joyce, is at Nature 450, 627; 2007.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 11, 2007
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Editorial in the December issue of Nature Nanotechnology , A little knowledge (Nature Nanotechnology 2, 731; 2007) acknowledges that communicating the risks and benefits associated with nanotechnology to the general public is more complex than researchers might have expected. According to surveys, one of which is published in the same issue of the journal, the public is not interested in the possible risks of the technology (despite Michael Crichton's best efforts).
In their report, Scientists worry about some risks more than the public (Nature Nanotechnology 2, 732 - 734; 2007), Dietram A. Scheufele et al. compare two recent US surveys among nanoscientists and the general public, concluding that "in general, nanoscientists are more optimistic than the public about the potential benefits of nanotechnology. However, for some issues related to the environmental and long-term health impacts of nanotechnology, nanoscientists were significantly more concerned than the public."
One interesting conclusion of the research is that industry and academic scientists are among the very few groups the public trusts the most for information about nanotechnology — greater than government bodies, regulatory agencies and news media. The authors write: "Nanotechnology may, therefore, be one of the first emerging technologies where academia and business have the ability to reach out directly to a public who trusts the information they provide. Ironically, nanotechnology may also be the first emerging technology for which scientists may have to explain to that public why they should be more rather than less concerned about some potential risks."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 07, 2007
Categories: Biosecurity, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his EMBO Reports editorial this month (8, 1087; 2007), Hope, hype and hypocrisy, Frank Gannon provides examples of overinflated claims made in some recent publications and press releases. He points out that, to the unsuspecting reader, these claims give the impression that a cure or treatment for a disease is just around the corner when the reality is almost always that it isn't. Reasons for this escalation of hype are addressed, but:

"Ultimately, the problem is that scientists over-promise by sending messages of being close to their goals even if this is not true. They also send messages that, as soon as the first results come in, the next steps to real applications are quicker than the previous research stage; this is not true either."

Systematic hyperbole and self-promotion are not only dishonest, but threaten the public's trust and support for science, and ultimately will undermine research itself. Or as Dr Gannon puts it: "an atmosphere of trust and transparency is better than a barrage of exaggerated claims and promises."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 04, 2007
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's Nature addresses how the responsibilities of co-authors for a scientific paper’s integrity could be made more explicit (Nature 450, 1; 2007). The text of the (free access) editorial:

The two most notorious frauds of modern science, by the stem-cell biologist Woo Suk Hwang and the physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, both brought into question the responsibilities of co-authors in the oversight of their colleagues’ work. But despite the concerns raised after these episodes, there remains a need for a clearer understanding, both within a collaboration and by readers of the eventual papers, of the various contributions made by the authors not only to the research but also to safeguarding its integrity.
One welcome development in transparency was pioneered by the medical journals. Authorship of a paper is justified when a researcher has contributed significantly to the work being described and to the writing or approval of the manuscript. But the traditional publication style is entirely opaque as to which co-author contributed what. Concern about ‘honorary authorship’ — in which an author is unacceptably included for reasons other than any scientific contribution — and about this lack of transparency has led to the increasing use of statements in papers that specify authors’ contributions. Some medical journals require them, and others, including the Nature family, strongly encourage their use and may yet make them compulsory.
Such statements delineate contributions to the work but do not underwrite its integrity. Something more is needed.
It is too glib to state that every co-author of a paper shares full responsibility for its content. A researcher who specializes in the radio-active dating of rock strata cannot necessarily be expected to vouch for a palaeontologist’s analysis of fossils within them — especially if the work has been carried out in labs on different continents.
The fact that simple trust may no longer suffice is a sad reflection on recent scientific history, but anything that supports public confidence in research has to be welcomed, provided that its burden is not too great. What follows is a proposal in that direction, on which we invite readers’ comments.
We suggest that journals should require that every manuscript has at least one author per collaborating research group who will go on record in a way that collectively vouches for the paper’s standards. Each would sign a statement with reference to Nature’s publication policies as follows:
“I have ensured that every author in my research group has seen and approved this manuscript. The data that are presented in the figures and tables were reviewed in raw form, the analysis and statistics applied are appropriate and the figures are accurate representations of the data. Any manipulations of images conform to Nature’s guidelines. All journal policies on materials and data sharing, ethical treatment of research subjects, conflicts of interest, biosecurity etc. have been adhered to. I have confidence that all of the conclusions presented are based on accurate extrapolations from the data collected for this study and that my colleagues listed as co-authors have contributed and deserve the designation ‘author’.”
Principal investigators traditionally bask in the glory of a well-received paper. We are proposing now that they willingly open themselves to sanctions that could be brought to bear should the paper turn out to have major problems.
Misconduct investigators go out of their way to spare anyone apart from the direct perpetrators, but they have indicated concerns over the degree of oversight within collaborations. If the damage to reputations were more widespread in the event of fraud, researchers would be even more fastidious about the data emanating from their labs and the due diligence they would impose. The chances of major frauds, with their disproportionate impact on the reputation of science as a whole, would be diminished.
We invite comments from readers on this editorial.
(The Nature journals' current policies can be seen at Nature's Guide to Authors and at the Author and Reviewers' website.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 31, 2007
Categories: Authorship, Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (24)

Juan C. Gallardo of Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York writes in this week's Correspondence (Nature 449, 572; 2007):

As chair of the American Physical Society's Committee on International Freedom of Scientists, I wish to express my alarm about the kafkaesque situation confronting the Russian biologist Oleg Mediannikov, reported in your News story 'Russian scientists see red over clampdown' (Nature 449, 122–123; 2007).
The American Physical Society is the biggest organization of physicists in the United States, with a large international membership. The society is independent of any government, and its international freedom committee is responsible for monitoring the human rights of scientists throughout the world, including the United States, and assisting those in need. In the past couple of years our efforts have been partially focused on Russia, where several scientists collaborating with foreign researchers have been intimidated and prosecuted.
As well as Mediannikov, we are actively assisting Valentin Danilov, Oscar Kaibyshev, Igor Sutyagin and Oleg Korobeinichev. We are committed to defending our colleagues at risk and we will continue to raise our voices whenever scholars encounter a prohibition on travelling, publishing or pursuing research. We call upon scientific human-rights organizations to join us to protest at restrictions, by any government, on the free exchange of ideas, be it by denying visas or barring scholars from attending conferences or taking academic positions.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 29, 2007
Categories: Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (0)

A news story in the current issue of Nature (449, 512-513; 2007) reports on how the US National Science Foundation (NSF) is investigating how researchers account for time spent on federally funded projects. Auditors have found that the records kept are often not accurate, undermining the ability of the NSF to ensure that its grants are spent appropriately.
Although the audits may simply reflect record-keeping lapses, they could have significant financial impacts. For instance, in a grant- rich school such as the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, cutting back on indirect costs by just 0.5% would save $600,000.
An Editorial in the same issue of the journal (Nature 449, 508; 2007) points out that "the NSF hasn't decided to conduct the audits arbitrarily. Whistleblowers at two universities highlighted cases in which researchers failed to tell the National Institutes of Health (NIH) about the amount of time they spent on projects it had funded. The universities involved subsequently repaid the money.", concluding: "These NSF efforts may, in time, serve as an instructive template for the NIH, a far larger agency that has done little as yet to monitor its grantees' effort reporting. With so much money at stake, a little extra paperwork is not necessarily a bad idea."
You can add your comments to the news story online at the journal website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 08, 2007
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The European Science Foundation and the US Office of Research Intergrity have created a web page of resources on scientific conduct and misconduct: References & Background Reading : European Science Foundation. The page contains links to relevant articles in Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Science and Research Policy, as well as information about books published on the topic. The list is part of the background for the World Conference of Science Integrity, being held this week (16-19 September 2007) at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal. From the Conference website:
The World Conference on Research Integrity is the first global forum convened to provide researchers, research administrators, research sponsors, journal editors, representatives from professional societies, policymakers, and others an opportunity to discuss strategies for harmonizing research misconduct policies and fostering responsible conduct in research.
The Nature journals' policies on ethics in publishing can be found at our authors' and reviewers' website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 18, 2007
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dr M. Nabeel Ghayur, of McMaster University Ontario, writes: I would like to add some points to Nature's News Feature "Human-subjects research: trial and error"(Nature 448, 530-532; 2007), on the important topic of clinical-trial review by regional versus central review boards. I feel that the main question is not about who conducts the review, but about it being performed thoroughly and diligently.
It is more than 40 years since the unanimous approval of the Declaration of Helsinki, yet we are still faced with many challenges in this area of research on human subjects. Episodes such as the fatal testing of gene therapy on Jesse Gelsinger in 1999 and the TeGenero fiasco in 2006 of severe side effects of a phase-I monoclonal antibody in six men, demonstrate that the need for stringent measures when it comes to clinical trials involving humans cannot be over-emphasized.
The need for stringent oversight is even more vital at a time of widespread outsourcing of trials from the West to developing countries, particularly in Africa and Asia. Many of these countries remain without concrete laws and legislation, sometimes without even functioning ethics committees in individual health-care institutions. It is imperative that trials are monitored to the best standards available worldwide.
We hear of cases such as that of Ru Huang of Johns Hopkins, accused of being engaged in unethical trials involving testing of drugs in India without formal consent (see Nature 412, 466; 2001). More recently, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer was sued by Government of Nigeria for $9 billion for allegedly carrying out trials in children without parental or official approval. These examples surely reflect the importance of strict ethics review of clinical trial proposals irrespective of the authority responsible for performing it.
However, as outlined in your News Feature, it does not make sense to have unnecessarily time-consuming bureaucracy, as delays can be equivalent to introduction of beneficial therapies. Informed consent forms should be kept as simple, short and meaningful as possible. Increasing the length of a form so as not to miss any information can make it harder for the patient to grasp, particularly a potential participant from a country where people are less well-educated and who will struggle to read and understand scientific and ethical jargon. There is a dire need to make the process of ethics review extensive, yet concise and effective, both for investigators and patients.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 07, 2007
Categories: Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's Nature (449, 8; 2007) features a News story about a plaigiarism scandal involving more than a dozen theoretical physicists at four universities in Turkey. Almost 70 papers by 15 authors have been removed from the popular preprint server arXiv, where many physicists post their work, by the server's moderators. They allege that the papers plagiarize the works of others or contain inappropriate levels of overlap with earlier articles. This is probably the largest single incident of its sort ever seen on the server, according to physicist Paul Ginsparg of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and founder of arXiv. "What these guys did was way over the line," he says. See here for the full version of the story (site licence or subscription required).
According to the Nature News story, Ginsparg says that it's not uncommon for scientists with a poor command of English to plagiarize introductions or background paragraphs from earlier work, often adding an appropriate citation. He thinks that although such practices are ethically questionable, it is inappropriate to be overly draconian. A recent analysis turned up numerous examples of plagiarism on the arXiv server (see Nature 444, 524–525; 2006).
The Nature journals' policies on plagiarism can be found on our free-access author and referees' website. The policy page contains links to various (free access) Editorials written in the Nature journals on the topic which, taken together, we hope provide a useful guide for authors.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 06, 2007
Categories: Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (0)

Language Log: Citation Plagiarism?
From the Language Log entry linked above: "Plagiarism normally involves either the unacknowledged borrowing of someone else's idea or the unacknowledged borrowing of someone else's words. A third kind of plagiarism is, however, occasionally mentioned, namely the citation of a reference without acknowledging that it came from another source. If author Jones reads a paper by Smith and thereby learns of a paper by Doe and cites Doe without mentioning that he owes the reference to Smith, he has committed this kind of plagiarism, if plagiarism it be."
Bill Poser, author of the Language Log entry, goes on to argue why this type of plagarism is not, in his view, plagiarism, as there is no deception involved. The authors of the original reference may, in Dr Poser's view, "deserve more credit than they receive, but that is a different matter."

See here for the JISC plagiarism advisory service, which provides generic advice and guidance on all aspects of plagiarism prevention and detection to institutions, academics and students.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 22, 2007
Categories: Citation analysis, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (1)

There is no greater burden of responsibility for scientists than that placed on those who conduct medical research on human subjects, according to an Editorial in Nature this week (448, 511-512; 2007). On the rare occasions that this duty is inappropriately discharged, the results can be devastating. Even so, once the initial outcry dies down, little tends to change.
The diverse collection of institutional review boards (IRBs) that oversee such research in the United States barely qualifies as a 'system'. Despite repeated attempts by the Institute of Medicine and others to highlight their shortfalls, the quality and effectiveness of the boards remain patchy (see the News Feature on page 530 of the same issue of the journal).
To strengthen the way human clinical trials are overseen, adequate funding for the Office for Human Research Protections and more widespread accreditation of the IRBs (ensuring proper training and support for committee members) would be a start. But this is not enough, states the Editorial -- real improvements in the IRB procedures are required. Some have suggested that the review of multicentre studies needs to be centralized, and certainly clearer ethical guidelines for local review boards could be provided (for example, on the question of payment for volunteers).
The Nature journals' policy for authors concerning research on human subjects is available here. As ever, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 08, 2007
Categories: Disciplines, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

From this week's (21 June issue) Nature Correspondence (Nature 447, 908; 2007):

The US Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) processes the applications of foreign students for the US Medical Licensing Examination, which evaluates candidates' basic and clinical knowledge in medicine. The examination has two steps, both of which must be passed for the ECFMG to recognize the individual as a medical doctor in the United States.
As a medical student, I applied for step 1 in January 2007, entering my country (Iran) in the contact address section. A message in red letters appeared on the registration page: "It has come to our attention that ECFMG may be subject to specific United States federal regulations that prohibit entities from doing business with or providing a service to any individuals who have an address of residence in specific restricted countries. The country of Iran is included on this list of restricted countries. In light of this, ECFMG is not able to allow you to request this service."
The political status of Iran or any other nation is not relevant to education. The result of the restriction is that all medical students and graduates who live in Iran are prevented from taking the US licensing examination. This surely is academic discrimination against a whole country.
Sina Zarrintan
Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Iran

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 25, 2007
Categories: Careers, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

This letter is reproduced in entirety from Nature's Correspondence in today's (21 June) issue (Nature 447, 908; 2007).
Scientists should promote co-operation, not boycott

Since 1931, the International Council for Science (ICSU) has upheld the principle of the universality of science, based on the right of scientists to work without discrimination on the grounds of citizenship, religion, creed, political stance, ethnic origin, race, colour, age or gender.
The entire ICSU membership, representing the scientific community in 112 countries and all disciplines, has consistently expressed its unequivocal support for this principle. This stance has stood the test of time throughout the Cold War, apartheid in South Africa and the new challenges posed by international terrorism. It is a strong expression of solidarity across the international science community: a critical reference point for individual scholars confronted with threats to their freedom.
The decision by the congress of the UK University and College Union to recommend that its members bar academic exchanges with Israeli researchers is a flagrant breach of this principle. It has rightly drawn substantial adverse comment from scientists, newspaper columnists and human-rights activists in the United Kingdom and internationally.
It is easy to understand the strong feelings generated by conflicts and people's desire to demonstrate their opposition to the actions of governments. But to do so through the medium of individual scholars is to sacrifice a profoundly important principle of freedom and solidarity. In situations of strife and conflict, it is surely the duty of scientists to promote international understanding and co-operation — not to penalize each other for the shortcomings of their governments.

Bengt Gustafsson
ICSU Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 21, 2007
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The authors of a controversial paper on stem cells publish a correction of their work in this week's issue of Nature (447, 880-881; 2007) but state in it that the errors do not affect the conclusions of the article. A News story also in this week's issue (Nature 447, 763; 2007) describes how the paper in question, published in 2002, claimed to find evidence for so-called 'multipotent adult progenitor cells', or MAPCs, in mouse bone marrow (Y. Jiang et al. Nature 418, 41–49; 2002). The work was led by Catherine Verfaillie, now director of the Stem Cell Institute at the Catholic University of Leuven.
From the News story: The paper challenged the prevailing idea that only stem cells derived from embryos were highly flexible. Some of its results have been reproduced by other labs, but no one has been able to replicate the work independently in its entirety. "I believe that despite the hype over the mistake, we and Nature made the conclusion that the final findings of the paper still stand," says Verfaillie.
This February, an investigation convened by the University of Minnesota — Verfaillie's former institution — found that her group had used incorrect procedures in the Nature paper, and that some of the data contained in it might be flawed. The investigation was a response to questions from a reporter from the magazine New Scientist, who pointed out that the figure from the Nature paper that has now been corrected was partly reproduced with different labels in another paper in another journal, Experimental Hematology (Y. Jiang et al. Exp. Hematol. 30, 896–904; 2002).
In response to the investigation, Nature convened a peer-review panel to analyse the data from the 2002 paper. According to Nature, the experts concluded that although the figure data were flawed, the paper's conclusions are still valid. No allegations of fraud or misconduct have been levelled at Verfaillie or anyone from her group. Verfaillie says her group cannot explain how the errors in the Nature paper occurred: "Why this happened, we have not been able to determine," she says.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 14, 2007
Categories: Data availability, Disciplines, Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (0)

US universities must act to recruit and retain minority faculty members.

From an Editorial in Nature 447, 753-754 (2007): The diversity of the typical American research university is widely admired, but is fashioned mainly on the basis of students and staff recruited from abroad. The universities have done less well at harnessing the talents of the racial minorities within the US population.
So-called under-represented minorities — African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans — formed more than a quarter of the American population in 2000, and are projected to account for more than 40% of it by 2050. Yet according to a 2005 study of 50 élite universities, undertaken by Donna Nelson, a chemist at the University of Oklahoma, they account for only 3% of tenured or untenured faculty in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy. Numbers are only slightly higher in engineering (4.6%).

Continue reading "Academic diversity in universities" »

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 14, 2007
Categories: Careers, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via news @ nature.com

Computer scientists at Columbia University in New York have used a mathematical model to estimate the number of flawed scientific papers that go unretracted, and its relation to journal impact factors.In correspondence published in EMBO Reports (M. Cokol et al. EMBO Rep. 8, 5, 422–423; 2007), the researchers find that fewer papers are retracted by journals with low impact factors. But their model raises as many questions as it answers, say specialists in scientific publishing, some of whom argue that it greatly oversimplifies the issues.

From the Nature story: "scientists and editors familiar with retraction issues are sceptical of the quality of the model's input data. Theoretical modelling exercises will generate bad results if the input data are flawed, says Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and a medical researcher at the Institute for Health Policy Studies, at the University of California, San Francisco.
Although the number of retracted articles is probably only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the number that should have been retracted, the model — based on journal impact factor and number of retractions — is too simplistic to capture the complex reality of the issues affecting the size and nature of the hidden part, Rennie says."

The full news @ nature.com story is here (site licence or subscription required).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 05, 2007
Categories: Ethics, Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (1)

Equating animal-rights activism with terrorism increases the penalties for offenders and will please many of their victims. But it is not in the interests of science. So states this week's lead Editorial in Nature (447, 353; 2007)

Last November, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was signed into law in the United States. It creates tough penalties for damaging property, making threats and conspiring against zoos, animal labs and the like. Leaving aside the merits of this act, its very name enshrines into law the idea that destructive activists are terrorists.

As one of the communities targeted by these activists, scientists may be tempted to embrace this rhetoric. Indeed, many people have personally felt terrified by the actions of the most extreme. But 'terrorist' is a word so debased and loaded by political use that, if it has any meaning at all, it is counterproductive. There is no such objective thing as a terrorist. A criminal is a person who has been convicted of a crime. We can examine a person's records and make an unemotional determination of whether or not they are a criminal. But a terrorist is, in practice, a person who fights for a cause we do not believe in using methods that we do not approve of. Calling someone a terrorist is a value judgement.

The full text of the Editorial is available here (site licence or subscription required).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 24, 2007
Categories: Animal experiments, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (1)

Recognition could support a science code of conduct : Article : Nature

Yan Ropert-Coudert of the National Institute of Polar Research, 1-9-10 Kaga, Itabashi-ku, Tokyo 173-8515, Japan, writes in Correspondence in this week's Nature (447, 259; 2007):

Recent instances of scientifically unethical behaviour such as that of Woo Suk Hwang (see Nature 439, 122–123; 2006) have put pressure on governments to take official measures. In Japan, for example, a data-falsification scandal shook the scientific community last year (see Nature 439, 514; 2006). In response, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), together with the Science Council of Japan, has decided to implement a code of conduct for scientists to detect and punish unethical acts.
Like the Hippocratic oath for physicians, the application of such a code to all scientific disciplines would surely be beneficial. It would make young researchers aware of the necessity of adopting ethical behaviour in the conduct of their work and would provide guidance on how to do so. Yet such misconduct must often stem from the ubiquitous pressure exerted on scientists to publish quickly and, if possible, in high-impact journals in order to have a career. The possibility of publishing a ground-breaking study depends on the quality and originality of the data. It can, therefore, become tempting to modify a few things here and there in a data set.
In this regard, adoption of a scientific code of conduct may not be enough. Efforts must be made in parallel to counteract the 'publish or perish' dogma. If there were a method for recognizing the value of a piece of work through the examination of its contribution to knowledge, rather than through the prestige of the journal in which it was published, this would be a good start.

The Japan code of conduct is here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 22, 2007
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is the full text of an Editorial in today's Nature (447, 1-2 ;3 May 2007), which is freely available. For further details of the Nature journals' policy on fraud and fabrication, see the Author and Reviewers' website. Comments on this editorial are welcome.

The use of electronic laboratory notebooks should be supported by all concerned.

Too often when errors or cases of fraud occur in science, the lab data required to reconstruct what happened have gone astray. And too often, the co-authors failed to exert due scrutiny on their colleagues' activities in order to prevent such misfortunes. The damage to personal and institutional reputations can be severe and, in rare high-profile cases, public trust can be eroded.

It is therefore in everyone's interest to pre-empt such cases as far as possible. Electronic laboratory notebooks offer a partial solution — and have other advantages too. This is despite the fact that maximizing their benefits will require a change in culture that many researchers will no doubt initially resist.

Continue reading "Share your lab notes" »

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 03, 2007
Categories: Communication, Data availability, Ethics, Policies, Publications | Permalink | Comments (4)

Abderhalden's fraud still wins him some supporters : Article : Nature

In this week's Correspondence pages of Nature (see above link for full text), U. Kutschera of the Univeristy of Kassel reminds readers that an old case of fraud is still being ignored in some quarters. From the Correspondence:

"Your Misconduct Special (Nature 445, 240–245; 2007) calls South Korean stem-cell biologist Woo Suk Hwang "arguably the highest-profile fraudster ever". A look into the history of fraud in the biomedical sciences reveals at least one other strong candidate for this title.

In the area of human reproductive biology, the Korean scandal is overshadowed by the case of the influential German physiologist Emil Abderhalden (1877–1950) and the non-existent Abwehrfermente or 'defence enzymes' he claimed to have discovered. The shocking story of his fraudulent work, over a long period, has been told by Ute Deichmann and Benno Müller-Hill (Nature 393, 109–111; 1998).

Briefly, Abderhalden — a powerful and influential scientist — published a first paper on his "most important discovery" in 1909, and a widely read and translated book on the subject followed in 1912 (E. Abderhalden Abwehrfermente: Die Abderhaldensche Reaktion Theodor Steinkopff, 7th edn, 1944). The 'Abderhalden reaction' was used as a pregnancy test, and to treat various diseases. From 1914 on, biochemists tried to repeat Abderhalden's experiments, but failed to achieve this. A number of experts published their negative findings, but Abderhalden continued to publish fabricated data until his death."

Prof. Kutschera concludes: "Worst of all, Abderhalden's myth is still alive. For instance, on the German site of the Internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, Emil Abderhalden was until this year listed as an "important physiologist and discoverer of the specific Abderhaldensche Abwehrfermente — he developed the first pregnancy test". Similar admiring descriptions can still be found in the latest editions of German lexica such as Die Zeit: Das Lexikon 2005 . The authors refer to Abderhalden's book, which remains available in libraries and second-hand, and is still taken seriously in the popular literature on biomedicine."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 09, 2007
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (2)

Juan-Carlos Lopez posts on Spoonful of Medicine: Retractions, confirmations and everything in between about The Scientist's recent glossary of correction terminology found in scientific publications. Read his post for a taste of some of those correction categories sent to journals that don't make it into the published literature.
The Nature journals' correction categories and criteria can be found here, incidentally.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 06, 2007
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Juan-Carlos Lopez, Chief Editor of Nature Medicine, discusses the question of data integrity of figures in his post on Spoonful of Medicine: The figure police.

Juan-Carlos discusses an editorial in the Journal of Cell Biology, which takes the line that "the progress of science depends on the reliability of the entire published record, and journal editors must do their part to ensure that reliability", urging editors to "participate in this dialogue with the scientific community, to help devise effective and practical standards that can be applied to the published literature".

Should scientific journals screen every image in every paper, as the Journal of Cell Biology editorial recommends? Or is a spot-checking system, such as used by the Nature journals, preferable, on the grounds that the vast majority of the papers published are not fraudulent, and that the journal could invest more usefully in other author and publication services? (This last point is particularly critical for small, society-owned journals that have limited resources.) Or is the responsibility that all research work is honest, and that the papers produced accurately reflect the work done, that of the scientific institution and/or the funder?

The Nature journals' policies on image integrity can be found at our Author and Referees' website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 22, 2007
Categories: Data availability, Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's issue of Nature (vol 445, pp 229 and 240-246; 2007) contains an Editorial and several news stories about scientific misconduct. These articles, with links to the journal content (subscription required) are listed at Nature's newsblog so that readers can comment.
From the Editorial: ...."most important of all, as the first scientific studies of the factors behind good conduct confirm, is the example set by senior researchers themselves. It is here in the laboratory — not in the law courts or the offices of a university administrator — that the trajectory of research conduct for the twenty-first century is being set."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 18, 2007
Categories: Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (0)