GoKawiilResearch misconduct can include a variety of infractions, including data fraud and manipulation.Credit: Tom Werner/Getty
For decades, academic institutions have struggled with how to prevent researchers who have committed misconduct from securing jobs at new universities while hiding the bad behaviour. A proposal published today in the journal Science1 offers a solution, at least in the United States: creating a national database of people found guilty of data fabrication, workplace harassment and more, that would be accessed by research institutions before making new hires.
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But scientists who spoke to Nature are divided over whether this centralized, confidential list would solve the problem or generate new ones.
Michael Lauer, one of the proposal’s authors, says that bad actors frequently evade accountability by resigning during an ongoing investigation at their university, or by agreeing to leave and sign a non-disparagement agreement with their institution, such that neither party can speak publicly about the incident.
This potentially enables a person to get hired by another university, which might not be aware of the previous misconduct, says Lauer, who for about ten years ran the extramural research programme at the US National Institutes of Health, a major funder of biomedical science. “We should make it much more difficult for offending scientists to evade accountability without there being appropriate transparency.”
A legal requirement
There is precedent for such a database: in the 1980s, the medical field faced a crisis, in which physicians who had engaged in misconduct were relocating across US state lines to escape their reputations, says Mark Barnes, a lawyer at Ropes & Gray in Boston, Massachusetts, who co-authored the proposal.
This prompted the US Congress to establish the National Practitioner Data Bank in 1990, which now holds over 1.9 million reports of malpractice, fraud and medical license suspensions. US hospitals are required by law to check this system before granting medical privileges and must repeat the query every two years to ensure the records of their staff members are up to date.
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