Skip to content

ACN - 101321555 | ABN - 39101321555

Australasian Human Research Ethics Consultancy Services Pty Ltd (AHRECS)

AHRECS icon
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Consultants
    • Services
  • Previous Projects
  • Blog
  • Resources
  • Feeds
  • Contact Us
  • More
    • Request a Quote
    • Susbcribe to REM
    • Subscribe to VIP
Menu
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Consultants
    • Services
  • Previous Projects
  • Blog
  • Resources
  • Feeds
  • Contact Us
  • More
    • Request a Quote
    • Susbcribe to REM
    • Subscribe to VIP
Exclude terms...
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
AHRECS
Analysis
Animal ethics
Animal Ethics Committee
Animal handling
Animal housing
Animal Research Ethics
Animal Welfare
ANZCCART
Artificial Intelligence
Arts
Australia
Authorship
Belief
Beneficence
Big data
Big data
Biobank
Bioethics
Biomedical
Biospecimens
Breaches
Cartoon/Funny
Case studies
Clinical trial
Collaborative research
Conflicts of interest
Consent
Controversy/Scandal
Controversy/Scandal
Creative
Culture
Data management
Database
Dual-use
Essential Reading
Ethical review
Ethnography
Euthanasia
Evaluative practice/quality assurance
Even though i
First People
Fraud
Gender
Genetics
Get off Gary Play man of the dog
Good practice
Guidance
Honesty
HREC
Human research ethics
Humanities
Institutional responsibilities
International
Journal
Justice
Links
Media
Medical research
Merit and integrity
Methodology
Monitoring
New Zealand
News
Online research
Peer review
Performance
Primary materials
Principles
Privacy
Protection for participants
Psychology
Publication ethics
Questionable Publishers
Research ethics committees
Research integrity
Research Misconduct
Research results
Researcher responsibilities
Resources
Respect for persons
Sample paperwork
sd
se
Serious Adverse Event
Social Science
SoTL
Standards
Supervision
Training
Vulnerability
x
Young people
Exclude news

Sort by

Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

Research Ethics Monthly | ISSN 2206-2483

Hong Kong Principles

Posted by Dr Gary Allen
in Research Integrity
on September 29, 2020
0 Comments
Keywords Good practice,International,Research Integrity,Researcher responsibilities,Resourcing practice,Training
Compass showing "Quality" and "Quantity" as directions

The publication of the Hong Kong Principles comes at a time when there has never been more scrutiny of research. In this pandemic, the importance of science has been reinforced time and time again, but the importance of efforts to enhance reproducibility and transparency in research has also come to the fore. What the Hong Kong Principles do is provide a framework whereby research practices that strengthen integrity in research – a core component of reproducibility and trustworthiness – can be recognised, supported and rewarded.

The principles came out of an initiative led by David Moher and Paul Glasziou, which were then further developed and refined at the 6th World Congress of Research Integrity, held in Hong Kong in June 2019 in what was a much less challenging time for the world.

The principles are built around the concept of responsible research practices and are as follows:

Principle 1: Assess researchers on responsible practices from conception to delivery, including the development of the research idea, research design, methodology, execution, and effective dissemination

Principle 2: Value the accurate and transparent reporting of all research, regardless of the results

Principle 3: Value the practices of open science (open research)—such as open methods, materials, and data

Principle 4: Value a broad range of research and scholarship, such as replication, innovation, translation, synthesis, and meta-research

Principle 5: Value a range of other contributions to responsible research and scholarly activity, such as peer review for grants and publications, mentoring, outreach, and knowledge exchange

These are of course not the first piece of work that aim to address research assessment and to recognise the perverse effect that research assessment has on researcher behaviour. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has been advocating for reform since 2013, initially with a focus on moving away from the Journal Impact Factor (JiF). More recently, DORA has expanded into work that seeks to understand the culture of research that informs research assessment, including the biases that affect assessment. The DORA declaration has been signed by many individuals and organisations worldwide and for example is supported by cOAlition S funders.

The Hong Kong Principles complement DORA and, by expanding on specific areas of research assessment and research practices, they also provide a link to other initiatives that seek to improve the quality and reliability of research, including in Australia work by the NHMRC through their Research Quality Steering Committee. Critically, the Hong Kong Principles call attention to the fact that the behaviours that support responsible research are time and resource intensive and may result in a smaller number of grants and publications. Hence, current measures of research productivity cannot adequately assess them.

Through a framework of research assessment throughout the research lifecycle, the Hong Kong Principles also reinforce the concept that integrity is not a static concept, but that reproducibility and quality of research require a whole of system approach.

Graphic about the Hong Kong principles

Fig 1 from https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000737
Indicators of responsible research practices.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000737.g001

What the publication of the Hong Kong Principles has highlighted is that, for many of the principles, there may be no uniformly accepted or easily comparable indicators. For example, the tracking of sharing of data and code (Principle 3) – key elements of reproducibility – are far behind citation indicators for journal publications.  Even harder to track is the work done to support culture within institutions – such as the mentoring, committee work and other leadership and academic citizenship work (Principle 5).

The publication of the Hong Kong Principles includes examples of good practice at institutions that already exist but there is an urgent need for more examples and evidence regarding the effectiveness of implementing any of the principles. As noted in our recent article (Moher et al., 2020), “Research institutions are key to the HKPs. They are the home of current and future researchers, where promotion and tenure assessments are carried out.” By building a database of good practices, the hope is that the HKPs will provide specific routes for institutions to adapt to their own needs.

There has never been a more important time to build a culture that supports integrity in research and to ensure that researchers can be supported in these practices.

Bibliography

Moher, D., Bouter, L., Kleinert, S., Glasziou, P., Sham, M. H., Barbour, V., Coriat, A. M., Foeger, N., & Dirnagl, U. (2020). The Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers: Fostering research integrity. PLoS biology, 18(7), e3000737. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000737

Author Affiliations

Ginny Barbour is Director of the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group and is Co-Lead, Office for Scholarly Communications, Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

David Moher is Director, Centre for Journalology, Clinical Epidemiology Program, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Ottawa, Canada.

COI

Ginny Barbour is Chair of the DORA Advisory Group and is on the NHMRC’s Research Quality Steering Committee

David Moher declares no conflicts of interest.

This post may be cited as:
Barbour, G. & Moher, D. (29 September 2020) Hong Kong Principles Research Ethics Monthly. Retrieved from: https://ahrecs.com/hong-kong-principles/

Related reading

Are we missing the true picture? Stop calling a moneybox, a fishing hook

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About the Corresponding Author

Admin

Sp-user Link
Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin-in Sp-mail User

About the blog

The senior consultants started AHRECS in 2007. We were looking for a way of responding to requests for advice on research ethics and integrity from the government, health and education sectors read more…

Comment rules

We decided to include comment functionality in the Blog because we want to encourage the Research Integrity and Human Research Ethics communities to contribute to public discourse about resourcing and improving practice. read more…

Related Links

Complaints against Research Ethics Monthly

Request a Takedown

Submission Guidelines

About the Research Ethics Monthly

About subscribing to the Research Ethics Monthly

A smiling group of multi-racial researchers

Random selected image from the AHRECS library. These were all purchased from iStockPhoto. These are images we use in our workshops and Dr Allen used in the GUREM.

Research Ethics Monthly Receive copies of the Research Ethics Monthly directly
by email. We will never spam you.

  • Enter the answer as a word
  • Hidden
    This field is hidden and only used for import to Mailchimp
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
  • Home
  • Services
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Home
  • Services
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Company
  • Terms Of Use
  • Copyright
  • Privacy Policy
  • Company
  • Terms Of Use
  • Copyright
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site Map
  • Site Map

Australasian Human Research Ethics Consultancy Services Pty Ltd (AHRECS)

Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin-in