Bottom-up workshops have laid a foundation for responsible research, but institutions must add structural support.

For seven years, young researchers in Malaysia have been organizing workshops on responsible research conduct. We have reached more than 1,000 people at home and elsewhere, including Thailand, Switzerland and the United States.

We were inspired by an August 2013 workshop in Kuala Lumpur, organized by the US National Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences Malaysia. Many of us wished that such training was more widespread in our country. To work out how we could provide it, I teamed up with Abhimanyu Veerakumarasivam, a geneticist at Sunway University in Subang Jaya, and Chai Lay-Ching, a microbiologist at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, with help from the US academy. Although some researchers in Malaysia were already familiar with human- and animal-research ethics, few had heard the phrase ‘responsible conduct of research’ (RCR) or received instruction in research integrity.

When I was a graduate student and postdoc in the United States, RCR training tended to be shallow discussions with few practical applications. A mandatory course merely called for me to read some material and answer a few questions. But for best practices to take root, researchers need more than rote knowledge. They need to believe these practices are important, and to be able to make ethical decisions that apply to their particular situation.

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