It has been a very busy six months for the committee. We have held two committee meetings (summarised below) and are preparing for the third of our 2024 quarterly meetings next week, which will be in Dundee. You will see below what has been keeping us busy as we reflect on the progress we have made so far this year.
The Foundation for Science and Technology event: Safeguarding trust in science – the role of research integrity 9 July
The UK Committee on Research Integrity is delighted to be sponsoring this hybrid event on Tuesday, 9July 2024 at the Royal Society in London and online. Professor Christopher Smith (AHRC), Cathy Alexander (GO-Science) and Sarah Jenkins (Elsevier) will be joining Rachael and Andrew to discuss how the credibility of all UK research can be bolstered by research integrity. We are really looking forward to the event and would love to see members of the research integrity community there. Please sign up for free tickets.
Exploring indicators of research integrity
Thank you to everyone who generously took part in workshops and conversations about indicators of research integrity that we held between October 2023 and March 2024. Your expertise was vital, enabling us to develop a long-list and short-list of indicators, which we will publish in the summer within a full report. We’ll look forward to hearing how the output from the project is taken up by the sector.
2024 Review of the Concordat to Support Research Integrity
The UK’s Concordat to Support Research Integrity is undergoing review, in which the content of the Concordat will be updated and revised. Our co-chairs were invited to chair the process, which is overseen by the Signatories of the Concordat. To ensure that the update reflects the views and needs of stakeholders, Signatories invite you to take part in an online consultation. Your responses will help to shape any revisions to the Concordat so that it is fit for the future and continues to safeguard research integrity. Please share news of the consultation widely, all responses are welcome. The consultation is open now until Monday 22 July 2024.
Enablers and inhibitors of research integrity
We announced in our November 2023 newsletter that we had commissioned Circlera, a partnership between the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN), the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) and the Science Policy Research Unit (University of Sussex) to carry out a review of the available published information on enablers and inhibitors of research integrity. We are pleased to announce that this report has been published today. Co-chair, Andrew George, will be at the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) conference in Brighton today and tomorrow. Andrew is a panellist on the Ethics and Integrity: Building a Culture of Research Integrity session on which this report will be discussed.
The committee would like to extend warm thanks to everyone who was involved in the creation of this report.
Our workstream on research misconduct
Following meetings between committee members and the cross-sector working group, we have just issued a tender for a piece of work that will build an evidence base about how research misconduct is approached internationally. It will also collect evidence about approaches to assurance in other UK sectors outside of, and adjacent to, UK research that could provide valuable lessons about what works well. This work will complement the recent work of UKRIO examining what the barriers are to investigating and reporting research misconduct. You can find our working group’s terms of reference and membership.
Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) blog: Placing research integrity at the heart of REF.
As guest authors of a recent HEPI blog discussing the Research Excellence Framework 2029 (REF2029), co-chair, Rachael Gooberman-Hill, and members of the committee, Nandini Das, Maria Delgado and Miles Padgett, make the case for placing research integrity at the heart of the REF.
8th World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI)
At the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity, we presented papers on “Building the Evidence Base” and on the “Research Integrity Indicators project from the UK Committee on Research Integrity”. The first of these described our work and last year’s analysis of annual statements and the second described the research indicators project. We were pleased to have the chance to discuss our work with international colleagues and to learn about evidence and initiatives from around the world.
Case studies
We have published two new cases in our series on approaches and initiatives from across the research system. You can read them on the resources page of our website.
UK Committee on Research Integrity: Reflections, 2024 committee meetings
January meeting
The UK Committee on Research Integrity’s first meeting of 2024 was kindly hosted by The British Academy, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. We are grateful for the exceptional hospitality and felt inspired both by the beautiful surroundings and the fruitful discussions that took place throughout the day.
A highlight of the day was our discussion on rigour with members of the learned academies and societies.
There was a strong, shared sense of purpose, progress and momentum among Committee members at this meeting as we work hard to deliver on the objectives set out in our Strategic Plan and as we look towards this year’s Annual Statement (our 2023 Annual Statement is available online). Delivering on these objectives is a collective effort by Committee members and an excellent Secretariat.
Ralitsa Madsen, UK Committee on Research Integrity Member
April meeting
The UK Committee on Research Integrity’s April 2024 meeting was hosted by UKRI at its London offices at Caxton House. As well as discussing current projects and stakeholder engagement, we were we were joined by guests from Government to discuss initiatives, opportunities and challenges in safeguarding trust, confidence and resilience in the research system. A discussion on championing the integrity that exists in the UK sector was balanced with observations on how to articulate and address what might not be working so well. We look forward to continuing the engagement.
As the Committee work on its second annual statement, due out later this summer, colleagues reported progress on the preparation of their contribution to the annual statement and ongoing workstreams.
Committee members working on the AI workstream, referenced two internal reports, intended to provide source material for peer-reviewed publications. Understanding AI’s implications for RI in the arts and humanities has been informed by a meeting with Christopher Smith, Executive Chair of AHRC. The continued research and authorship support of the PETRAS team at UCL was appreciated in progressing the team’s literature review and writing initiatives.
The committee heard about the progress of the Research Integrity Indicators workstream, delineating the findings of the five stakeholder workshops which Research Consulting are reviewing and preparing to publish a report on in liaison with the project and advisory group.
We discussed the progression of the Research Misconduct workstream, noting the forthcoming UKRIO report ‘Barriers to Investigating and Reporting Research Misconduct’, and the coordination with the chair of the group responsible for the report to ensure complementarity rather than duplication. We are about to commission a piece of work on international models to address misconduct and models of assurance from other sectors to help address what we have currently identified as an evidence gap in understanding scale and granularity of the reporting misconduct landscape.
The REF working group discussed its engagement with the sector, including consultation responses, open access, and issues of rigour and integrity in the process of research assessment. In concluding the meeting our ways of working discussion highlighted the importance of enhancing channels of communication, the collaborative ethos with other sector bodies, the engagement with organisations outside HE, the importance of reflecting on unintended consequences as we progressed the different workstreams and the value of open, reflective and challenging conversations in the work we do.
Maria Delgado, UK Committee on Research Integrity Member