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Institute of Medicine
500 Fifth Street NW
Washington DC 20001
iomwww@nas.edu
tel: 202.334.2352
fax: 202.334.1412
Media Contact
(Journalists Only)
news@nas.edu
tel. 202.334.2138
fax: 202.334.2158
Staff Directory
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Assessing Integrity in Research Environments - Background Information
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The Public Health Service (PHS) regulation on responding to allegations of scientific misconduct states that "institutions shall foster a research environment that discourages misconduct in all research. In 1999 the Department of Health and Human Services Review Group on Research Misconduct and Research Integrity recommended that "the role, mission, and structure of ORI change to become one of preventing misconduct and promoting research integrity principally through oversight, education, and review of institutional findings and recommendations."
To provide an empirical basis for this new mission, ORI plans to develop a longitudinal database that tracks the state of integrity in research environments. ORI, PHS, and the extramural research community could use this database to guide development of education, prevention, and research programs related to research integrity issues and to evaluate the effectiveness of those programs. In the absence of such data, PHS and the extramural community will continue to make decisions regarding research integrity issues in a vacuum, relying primarily on speculation and the infrequent individual case reports that receive notoriety, such as recent concerns about gene therapy trials and the quality of IRB reviews. This can lead to expensive and inefficient solutions when the state of the actual problem is unknown.
The low incidence of allegations of misconduct means that they are not likely to be helpful in measuring changes in the research environment, and ORI is seeking guidance on what might be called surrogate measures of the health of research environments. These might involve, for example, individual knowledge of attitudes, institutional policies or activities, laboratory practices, public confidence, the research record itself.
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Last Updated: 6/19/2003, 02:26 PM
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