Researchers have long felt financial stresses from Congress. Now lawmakers are adding pressure over accuracy and integrity, expanding a battle to define national interests in science.
The immediate vehicle is a Republican bill in the House of Representatives, known as the First Act, to set policy rules for the National Science Foundation. One section would toughen penalties for falsification or plagiarism and give the NSF’s inspector general new responsibility for investigating them.
The First Act’s authors, including Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who is chairman of the House science committee, have described it as a necessary step to guard against the misuse of taxpayer dollars.
But university scientists are increasingly raising alarms over the bill, and its “misrepresentation of research results” section in particular, calling it a needless attack on an enforcement system that has proved sufficient.
The attempted change is “very problematic,” said Arthur I. Bienenstock, an emeritus professor of photon science at Stanford University who serves on the NSF’s governing board.
As an associate director in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Clinton administration, Mr. Bienenstock spent three years establishing a common, governmentwide definition of research misconduct and rules for handling it.
“That harmonization has served the nation well,” Mr. Bienenstock said here last week during the annual policy conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Concerns About Accuracy
Aside from the political aspects, the AAAS gathering reflected the continuing concern among scientists to improve their record on the accuracy of their work. The most extended plenary session in the two-day conference was an examination of “Reproducibility in Science” that included a review of several emerging strategies for improving the reliability of research results.
Researchers have been plagued in recent years by growing doubts about the reliability of their findings, with some analyses suggesting that most findings published in scientific journals are as likely to be false as true. In addition to overt financial conflicts of interest, the problem has been attributed to factors that encourage haste, including career pressure to publish and win grants.
Solutions now being put in place include mandates to report financial associations between companies and outside researchers, and trial-registration systems in which expected investigative paths are declared in advance to deter the manipulation of results.
Even more aggressive steps are now working their way into the research community, said Brian A. Nosek, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and co-founder of the Center for Open Science. The center, established last year near his Charlottesville campus, provides systems for data sharing and research cooperation, training programs, and studies of their effectiveness.
Going beyond trial registration, Mr. Nosek described for the AAAS conference the concept of “register reports,” in which a researcher tells a prospective journal of the entire methodology and protocols of his or her proposed study, so that it can be peer-reviewed and accepted in advance. That removes the pressure for a researcher to massage results or even prove a hypothesis, and just concentrate on conducting and reporting a study accurately, Mr. Nosek said.
“This kind of methodology shifts a number of these incentives in important ways,” he said.
Mr. Nosek also suggested that scientific journals help improve the incentives for researchers by the simple inclusion of “badges,” or logos, that appear on an article signifying compliance with procedures such as pre-registering the study and making the data and materials freely available.
Support for Replication Studies
The Center for Open Science, founded with a $5.25-million gift from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, also is coordinating a system through which outside researchers can try to replicate published studies. Among the many benefits, Mr. Nosek said, is the democratization of research, giving a role to faculty members and students at universities that aren’t traditional research-intensive institutions.
It’s not evident, however, that Congress needs to get involved at this point by toughening penalties for shoddy research, said Tobin L. Smith, vice president for policy at the Association of American Universities.
In the case of the NSF, the universities are much better positioned than the agency’s inspector general to investigate problems involving their own faculty members, Mr. Smith said. And in cases where there may be doubt about a university’s moves, the inspector general still has the right to take action, he said.
The First Act also has drawn criticism, from both universities and the Obama administration, over language that would define budgetary levels at the NSF, division by division, with a particular emphasis on cutting spending in the social sciences.
The change appears to be an attempt “to fix something that isn’t broken,” John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told the opening session of the AAAS conference.
Representative Smith, in response to criticisms from Mr. Holdren and others at the AAAS conference, said he seeks only to ensure “transparency and accountability” at the NSF.
“It’s unfortunate that the president’s science adviser would rather provide NSF with a blank check than set basic standards of transparency,” Mr. Smith said in a written statement to The Chronicle. “The NSF’s cornerstone remains solid, but its boarded-up windows are what need repair.”
