In JAMA Viewpoint Article, Minal Caron and Mark Barnes Examine Proposed Increase in Government Authority in Research Misconduct Proceedings

In The News
June 20, 2024

In the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Viewpoint article, health care counsel Minal Caron and health care partner Mark Barnes examine a proposed increase in government authority in research misconduct proceedings.

Public scrutiny of academic research has intensified, as evidenced by recent resignations of prominent university leaders, retractions of articles by leading scientists and the increased media coverage of research misconduct, that is often defined as falsification or fabrication of research data or plagiarism.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has proposed substantial amendments to the regulations underpinning how institutions process these allegations. If adopted, these changes would steer the research misconduct process away from a peer review model in a framework of institutional autonomy, and would give more authority to ORI, with a more prescriptive and legalistic process that is less familiar to physicians and scientists.

The authors note that academic and medical institutions should understand the public, political and ethical pressures on ORI to make oversight of research integrity more robust. Institutions can relieve some of these pressures by making their own research misconduct processes more exacting, efficient and, when possible, more transparent with regard to the outcome of specific cases, leading to improved public trust in the scientific research enterprise.

The article was co-authored by Barbara Bierer, faculty director of the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard.

The authors submitted a comment letter to the ORI on the Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.