Post by theshee on Jun 20, 2013 16:56:49 GMT 10
Britain’s leading science institutions will be told on Monday that they will be stripped of many millions of pounds in research grants if they employ rogue researchers who fake the results of experiments, The Independent has learnt.
The clampdown comes as retractions of scientific claims by medical journals are on course to top 500 for the first time in 2013 - having been just 20 a year in the late 1990s, when Andrew Wakefield notoriously claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism in children. In April, the UK’s first researcher was jailed for falsifying data over a prolonged period.
The Government is concerned that Britain’s prized second place in global research behind the US will be at threatened if more fact-fabricators are exposed. It knows that hundreds of thousands of jobs could easily go to foreign rivals if British laboratories do not keep coming up with new product ideas, to be made by major multinational companies in UK factories.
All of the country’s 133 universites and colleges of higher education are being forced to sign a new Concordat for Research Integrity - having been warned by major fund providers that those who do not will be refused access to more than £10 billion in research grants funded each year by British taxpayers - and as much again from the private sector.
A spokesman for Universities UK, which chaired negotations with the grant providers, said: “From next year, universities in the UK will have to prove compliance with the research integrity concordat in order to receive research grant. They are doing this to help demonstrate to government, business, international partners and the wider public that they can continue to have confidence in the research.”
Retractions of medical claims alone in 2013 - logged by the Retraction Watch blog - are certain to be more than 400, and could easily top 500. Some result from genuine mistakes, several plagiarise other scientists’ work, breakthroughs that haven’t been checked. But as many as one in 10 of them contain lies.
The grant allocators believe it will take at least three years to achieve “research purity”. They will lay down a set of rules that will decide how the ethics of British scientists can be policed. The culture change demanded is immense, and raises the prospect of Britain’s university professors suddently being exposed to intense public scrutiny.
Under the new rules, universities will no longer be able to simply fire researchers who corrupt data and then ask for more money. Instead, they will have to proving their team selection and management skills in advance. They will also have to ensure that they employ staff not just for their science knowledge, but whom they can trust implicitly.
More importantly, they will have to demonstrate annually that each team member’s graphs and spreadsheets are precisely correct.
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Happy New Years Everybody!!!
