- 10:00: Trial lecture: “What is Responsible Research and how can Research Institutions best promote such research?”
- 12:00: Public defence
Opponents
- First opponent: associate professor Stefan Eriksson, Director of the Center for Research Ethics & Bioethics, Uppsala University
- Second opponent: professor Bjørn Hofmann, Institute for the Health Sciences, NTNU, Gjøvik, Norway
- Leader of the committee: centre director Beate Elvebakk, Centre for the Study of Professions, OsloMet.
Leader of the public defence is professor Tone Alm Andreassen, Centre for the Study of Professions, OsloMet.
Abstract
Until the 1970s, the consensus was that the self-correcting nature of research was sufficient in preventing fraud and other questionable practices. A series of scandals eventually made this view untenable, and research integrity has emerged as both a research field and a policy field.
Dishonesty in research is a problem for the trustworthiness of research and can cause serious
harm. This thesis is about how best to distribute the responsibility for preventing misconduct in research among policymakers, research organizations, and individual researchers.
The main argument has the following structure:
(1) I show, by analyzing qualitative data from a survey conducted as part of the ERC Horizon 2020 PRINTEGER-project, that social control and whistleblowing among researchers is insufficient in preventing and handling cases of research misconduct. Researchers are often reluctant to report misconduct, and when they do, they tend to experience that nothing happens or they face retribution.
(2) Policymakers and international organizations have introduced rules and codes of conduct to compensate for the research community’s failure to ensure compliance with its own norms, but these measures are not well-suited to solve the problem. I use data from the PRINTEGER-survey and interviews with researchers from commissioned research organizations to argue that research is an activity that is challenging to regulate through national rules and guidelines, as it is too diverse and research practices are too far removed from the policy level.
(3) Norway, Denmark, and Sweden have recently introduced new laws aimed at promoting research ethics and integrity. They start from an assumption that the research community itself should form academic norms. Based on the content of the propositions (bills) to the respective Scandinavian parliaments, I argue that the role of policymakers in securing integrity in research should be ensuring that research organizations promote integrity rather than try to formalize the content of research ethics and integrity. Policymakers can do this by holding research organizations accountable and giving them the tools they need to live up to this responsibility. Fraud and misconduct in research are severe problems, but the measures enacted to prevent such practices should avoid disrupting or hindering the practices they are supposed to protect. Here, policymakers should support the research community rather than try to control it through rules.
