Ethics in research publishing has become a hotbed of concern for academics and institutions
One of the first sessions on the opening day of Universities South Africa’s recent Higher Education conference addressed the gravity and extent of unethical research, both globally and in South Africa.
This is so serious that on 31 July 2019 Universities South Africa co-signed a Statement on Ethical Research and Scholarly Publishing Practices about principles such as peer review and social awareness that should inform such endeavours. The other signatories are the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), the Council on Higher Education (CHE), the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and the National Research Foundation (NRF).
So what was the impetus for this joint statement? This became clear at the session titled Ethics and integrity in research publishing.
The first speaker, Dr Dorsamy “Gansen” Pillay, Deputy Chief Executive Officer: Research and Innovation Support and Advancement at the NRF, borrowed an analogy relating to publications and predatory publishing from Dr Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist. Finkel was a plenary speaker at the 6th World Conference on Research Integrity, which Pillay had attended in Hong Kong in June.
Scholarly publishing has boomed. Worldwide there are over eight million researchers and over a quarter of a million new PhDs are qualifying per year. Since 2011 China has added 1 million researchers to its workforce, and four million academic articles are published annually in more than 40 000 journals.
Finkel had said that if you think of the process from researcher to print, it is like a bridge which has grown from a pedestrian road to a multi-layered highway.
Along the way there has been some contraband in these trucks on the bridge, some trucks not roadworthy, some people bypassing the bridge. Yet the bridge is still fundamentally sound “because we have custodians who really crosscheck our work before it is published”. But it is showing signs of wear and tear: “20 000 retracted papers in the Retraction Watch recently”, said Dr Pillay, referring to the respected New York-based blog’s recent announcement of the total number of academic paper retractions it has tracked since 2010.
In 2015, analysis by the US Federal Reserve of 67 economics papers published, revealed only one third could be independently replicated. Another example Pillay quoted was a 2018 analysis of 100 psychology papers of which only two in five could be independently replicated.
“So the quality assurance mechanisms that safeguard the integrity, robustness and the fidelity of these submissions is questionable,” said Dr Pillay. He said this could be summed up by an image he presented which stated: “what do you mean my facts are wrong? I copied everything straight off the internet.”
The local situation is outlined in the research on South African publishing in predatory journals which Johann Mouton and Astrid Valentine of Stellenbosch’s CREST (Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology) did from 2005 to 2014.
The bigger the boom in research publishing, the weaker the quality checks seem to become, said Dr Dorsamy “Gansen” Pillay, Deputy Chief Executive Officer: Research and Innovation Support and Advancement at the National Research Foundation.
It showed the government paid at least R100m to universities for research that led to publications in predatory journals, which are journals that exist largely for profit, charge a lot to publish articles, and are not peerreviewed. In other words, they are not credible.
The good news, however, is that predatory publishing is now decreasing in South Africa – only 130 articles picked up in 2017 compared to 820 in 2014.
“But that does not suggest that academics have stopped publishing in predatory journals,” said Dr Pillay. He referred also to other questionable practices such as editors publishing in their own journals “so it’s almost incestuous” as well as “excessive submission of conference proceedings for subsidy by certain individual academics. This is actually gaming the DHET publications subsidy system, and therefore we call upon the DHET, as the custodians of the subsidy system for research output, to take action,” he said.
Passing a research integrity test must be made a condition for receiving a research grant in South Africa, Dr Pillay suggested
There is now a move towards accredited courses in research integrity, both internationally and locally, which South Africa needed to emulate on a broader basis.
“Can we not as a cohort, as partners, look at something that we can launch online and that is easily accessible to universities, and that there is a requirement, that all of you that applied for a university grant, you should have gone through a research integrity module and, of course, passed it?”
He said UCT had won the bid to host the 7th World Conference on Research Integrity in 2021 and was in the process of constituting a local organising committee.
Professor Stephanie Burton, Vice-Principal for Research, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies at the University of Pretoria, began her presentation with the value of research and publishing. We do research, she said, “to generate new knowledge and to find answers to questions”. And this new learning had to be made available so society could be aware of the research’s potential benefits.
“If we don’t publish, there is not much point in conducting the research, and if the relevant stakeholders don’t have an opportunity to use that new knowledge, how will they benefit?” she said.
“Data collected on the basis of unfounded assumptions is bound to yield tenuous conclusions…Who is being unethical here? The supervisor, the researcher or the entire value chain?” Professor Stephanie Burton, Vice-Principal for Research, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies at the University of Pretoria asked.
Prof Burton pointed out a media report a few months ago that said SA academic researchers were being paid, personally, for the articles they were publishing, which was driving unethical behaviours. The money referred to was the national subsidy paid to universities but it was not common practice, she said, for this to be paid into their pockets. Instead, it was usually used to support the development of their research.
She spoke too about the problem of weak data, which she described as “data that has been collected on the basis of what may be unfounded assumptions that have insufficient or possibly a complete lack of intellectual depth … where there isn’t a sound scientific question” – which can lead to tenuous conclusions.
“Who is being unethical here? Is it the mentors, the overseers, the supervisors of those researchers? Is it the ethics committees that we have in our institutions? Is it the DVC (Deputy Vice-Chancellor) for research?
“We all have beautiful policies, and processes and committees …but how do we know that our researchers are behaving ethically ….This is a question that keeps every DVC for research awake at night.”
The third speaker, Prof Narend Baijnath, CEO of CHE, said they had hosted a conference on academic integrity in March 2018. Selected papers from it are in the South African Journal of Science being published later in 2019.
Government policy yielding unintended consequences
He said some of the financial irregularities of the government subsidy to institutions had arisen, unintentionally, from the 2003 DHET publication, Policy and Procedures for Measurement of Research Output of Public Higher Education Institutions. The policy had introduced financial incentives for research outputs with the intention to encourage academics to focus on research and increase their number of publications. That had happened but the “negative, more pernicious effects flowed out of certain institutions who do give direct incentives to staff”.
“I know some institutions give a portion to the individual, another proportion to the department, another proportion to the faculty or college and then a proportion goes into a general fund for research,” he said. Another negative consequence of the policy is the “publish or perish kind of culture” to generate income.
He said plagiarism was also a pervasive problem and cited a 2015 study by Adele Thomas and Gideon P de Bruin of the University of Johannesburg. It looked at 371 articles published in 19 SA management journals and revealed that 50% had high and excessive plagiarism, which it defined as 15% and more.
“If academics themselves are plagiarising then we can more or less accept that they will be turning a blind eye and be less vigilant when it comes to the students,” said Baijnath. He said “salami-slicing’, publishing in low-end journals was a problem: “Someone that takes two years to produce a really groundbreaking article will get credited and rewarded in the same way as someone who has produced in five low-grade publications.”
His recommendations included dealing decisively with breaches of research ethics and integrity so the consequences are a deterrent.
Feedback on the presentations included a comment from Prof Eugene Cloete, Vice-Rector for Research, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies at Stellenbosch University, who chaired the session.
If academics themselves are plagiarising, then we can accept that they will turn a blind eye when it comes to the students, Prof Narend Baijnath, CEO at the Council of Higher Education (CHE) said.
He recommended the global code of conduct for research in resource-poor settings. It was a way of preventing what it referred to as “ethics dumping – the practice of exporting unethical research practices to lower income settings” where there wasn’t a proper system for ethical approval.
The DHET must issue a policy banning personal pay incentives to researchers across the entire university system, Prof Phindile Lukhele-Olorunju, Director for Research Management at the University of Mpumalanga, propositioned.
Prof Phindile Lukhele-Olorunju, Director for Research Management at the University of Mpumalanga, said she was sure an NRF workshop she had attended had helped bring about the reduction in predatory publishing and unethical research. Prof Johann Mouton had done a presentation, which would have been similar to this one, and thereafter they had all informed their researchers.
However, she still had a problem with researchers who wanted her office to help them in identifying a predatory journal, which sometimes wasn’t easy. She had even asked the DHET about a particular journal and they had declined to comment. She also said there had to be a statement, applicable to all universities, about no money going to the pocket of researchers.
“We are confronted by researchers coming from institutions where they pocket the money and when you say ‘we are not pocketing money here’, it becomes a controversial issue,” she said.
Dr Rocky Skeef, Executive Director: Reviews and Evaluation at the NRF, and its representative on the local organising committee of the forthcoming world conference at UCT, responded to her comment by acknowledging that the NRF and the DHET had two separate lists of predatory journals. He said they were meeting again soon to work towards creating a national list.
Written by Gillian Anstey, an independent writer commissioned by Universities SA
