Last year, I was invited by Tracey Bretag to contribute a chapter to the Handbook of Academic Integrity. The invite was a little unusual – find another author and work with him or her to compare how research integrity has been dealt with in your two jurisdictions. It could have gone horribly wrong. It didn’t, for two reasons. First, I was delighted to be partnered with Pieter Drenth whose career happens to include a period as Vice-Chancellor of VU University Amsterdam, and President of both the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the ALLEA (All European Academies). Secondly, the exercise of comparing research integrity strategies in Australia and The Netherlands actually proved to be highly productive, helped me understand some of the strengths and weaknesses of the Australian response, and was a timely reminder of the value of assessing critically what might be happening in research integrity beyond the borders of our own countries.

The chapter has just been published (Israel and Drenth, 2016). In it, we argue…

In Australia and the Netherlands, research institutions and their funders, as well as academics, state integrity agencies, judges, governments, and journalists, have contributed to the development of rules and procedures that might help prevent, investigate, and respond to research fraud and misconduct. Both countries have experienced scandals and have ended up with codes, investigatory committees, and national research integrity committees.

National policy has created a series of expectations for research institutions. However, in both countries, the primary responsibility for research integrity remains with the institutions under whose auspices the research is carried out, as well as with the researchers themselves. Research institutions have to decide how to respond to misconduct, albeit in ways that are open to scrutiny by national advisory committees, the media, courts, and state accountability mechanisms. As a result, many institutions have amended and sharpened their own codes and regulations; refined their mechanisms for advising staff, reporting and investigating suspected misconduct, and responding to findings of misconduct; improved their protection rules for whistleblowers; regulated data storing and archiving; and sought to foster greater transparency in both their research and research integrity procedures. However, while researchers have been encouraged to embed awareness and acknowledgment of these principles through teaching, supervision, and mentoring of students and junior staff, less effort has been placed on resourcing good practice, tracing and understanding the causes of misconduct, and on fostering and entrenching a research culture invested with the values of professional responsibility and integrity.

Other chapters in the research integrity part of the Handbook compare combinations of Austria, Canada, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, China and Korea, and there are plenty of other contributors to the volume from Australia, including Brian Martin (with one chapter on plagiarism and another on the relationship between integrity and fraud – a topical issue, given the recent sentencing of Bruce Murdoch) and David Vaux (scientific misconduct).

Reference
Israel, M & Drenth, PJD (2016) Research Integrity in Australia and the Netherlands. In Bretag, T (ed.) Handbook of Academic Integrity. Springer. ISBN 978-981-287-097-1 http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789812870971

Contributor
Mark Israel is professor of law and criminology at The University of Western Australia.
Click here for Mark’s AHRECS bio
Click here for Mark’s UWA page

This post may be cited as: Israel M. (2016, 17 May) Comparing research integrity responses in Australia and The Netherlands. Research Ethics Monthly. Retrieved from:
https://ahrecs.com/research-integrity/comparing-research-integrity-responses-australia-netherlands