It starts with five key principles that have remained the same throughout the three versions of the Concordat, as they are foundational and necessary to maintain the highest standards of research integrity. Honesty, rigour, transparency and open communication, care and respect and accountability.
The rest of the Concordat is structured around five commitments which have all been revisited and refreshed, reflecting changes in research practices as well as emerging technologies. A document from the UK Committee on Research Integrity (UKCORI) – who now host the Concordat online – sets out why and where these changes were made by the Research Integrity Concordat Signatories Group (which includes Cancer Research UK). Each commitment contains actions for different groups of people – employers (such as universities), funders and those conducting research. One change I’m very positive about is that the terminology has become much more inclusive – where it used to say “researchers” it now uses the term “research community”.
I find this helpful for two reasons. The first is that when I’m talking about the principles in the Concordat, or delivering training on research integrity, I can now explicitly include everyone regardless of their specific job title, or whether they would consider themselves to be a ‘researcher’.
The second is personal: having moved out of a lab five years ago, my role is very much in the ‘research-enabling’ category, which meant that the ‘researcher’ language didn’t really feel like it applied to me. This ‘research community’ term means that I can now see myself in the Concordat – when I design an activity or write a policy, I’m able to remind myself of these core principles and how they apply to my work.
Addressing the elephant in the room
Commitment 4 in the 2019 Concordat focused heavily on research misconduct, largely from the perspective of helping define the most serious breaches of research integrity, and setting out how organisations should fairly and transparently conduct investigations. In delivering training around the Concordat it felt important to make researchers aware of what was expected of them, but most of this Commitment felt quite distant from the day-to-day experience of most researchers.
With growing recognition that activities falling below the threshold of misconduct can have serious impacts on the quality and reliability of research, the revised Concordat broadens this section to include questionable research practices. These are defined as “minor infractions or research practices, including avoidable errors, which fall short of the definition of intentional research misconduct.” The Concordat says they may arise from “lack of knowledge or attention to detail” – areas that feel like low hanging fruit for improving research practices through better training and support for researchers.
Sometimes questionable research practices can arise through “negligence, or deliberate action, and may occur where there is no evident intention to deceive” – this is why it’s so important to create an open research culture where it’s normal to address mistakes and to destigmatise correcting the research record. The new emphasis in this section of the Concordat supports this direction of travel while making it very clear what the expected standards for research are, and I’m looking forward to seeing how research institutions build on this commitment to further their training of researchers.
