Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. It promotes science in many ways: administering grants, advising government, holding meetings and lectures, and publishing expert reports on scientific matters of public importance.  

There are currently around 1,800 Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society, all elected through a stringent and highly competitive process which includes nomination by two Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS), detailed scrutiny of the candidate's achievements and publications, reports by referees, and consideration by a committee of experts in their broad area of research.  Although most Fellows are elected on the basis of their scientific contributions, others are nominated on the basis of "wider contributions to science, engineering or medicine through leadership, organisation, scholarship or communication".

For many scientists, election to the Royal Society is the pinnacle of their scientific career. It establishes that their achievements are recognised as exceptional, and the title FRS brings immediate respect from colleagues. Of course, things do not always work out as they should. Some Fellows may turn out to have published fraudulent work, or go insane and start promoting crackpot ideas. Although there are procedures that allow a fellow to be expelled from the Royal Society, I have been told this has not happened for over 150 years. It seems that election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, like loss of virginity, is something that can't readily be reversed.

This brings us, then, to the case of Elon Musk, who was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018 on the basis of his technological achievements, notably in space travel and electrical vehicle development. Unfortunately, since that time, his interests have extended to using social media for political propaganda, while at the same time battling what he sees as "woke mind virus" and attacks on free speech. Whereas previously he seemed to agree with mainstream scientific opinion on issues such as climate change and medicine, over the past year or two, he's started promoting alternative ideas.   

In summer of 2024, a number of FRSs became concerned at how Musk was using his social media platform (previously Twitter, now termed X) to stir up racial unrest and anti-government sentiment in the UK. Notable tweets by him from this period included incendiary comments and frank misinformation, as documented in this Guardian article. 

This led to a number of Fellows expressing dismay that Musk had been elected. There was no formal consultation of the Fellowship but via informal email contacts, a group of 74 Fellows formulated a letter of concern that was sent in early August to the President of the Royal Society, raising doubts as to whether he was "a fit and proper person to hold the considerable honour of being a Fellow of the Royal Society". The letter specifically mentioned the way Musk had used his platform on X to make unjustified and divisive statements that served to inflame right-wing thuggery and racist violence in the UK. 

Somebody (not me!) leaked the letter to the Guardian, who ran a story about it on 23rd August.

I gather that at this point the Royal Society Council opted to consult a top lawyer to determine whether Musk's behaviour breached their Code of Conduct. The problem with this course of action is that if you are uncertain about doing something that seems morally right but may have consequences, then it is easy to find a lawyer who will advise against doing it. That's just how lawyers work. They're paid to rescue people from ethical impulses that may get them into trouble. And, sure enough, the lawyer determined that Musk hadn't breached the Code of Conduct. If you want to see if you agree, you can find the Code of Conduct here.

Many of the signatories of the letter, including me, were unhappy with this response. We set about assembling further evidence of behaviours incompatible with the Code of Conduct. There is a lot of material, which can be broadly divided into two categories, depending on whether it relates to "Scientific conduct" or "Principles".  

On Scientific conduct, the most relevant points from the Code of Conduct are:

2.6. Fellows and Foreign Members shall carry out their scientific research with regard to the Society's statement on research integrity and to the highest standards. 

2.10. Fellows and Foreign Members shall treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including supervisors, colleagues, other Society Fellows and Foreign Members, Society staff, students and other early‐career colleagues, technical and clerical staff, and interested members of the public. 

2.11. Fellows and Foreign Members shall not engage in any form of discrimination, harassment, or bullying.

Most of those I've spoken to agree that a serious breach of these principles was in 2022, when Musk tweeted: "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci", thereby managing to simultaneously offend the LGBTQ community, express an antivaxx sentiment, and put Fauci, already under attack from antivaxxers, at further risk. Fauci was not a Fellow at the time these comments were made, but that should not matter given the scope of the statement is "individuals in the scientific community". This incident was covered by CBS News.

Now that the US election is over, Musk seems emboldened to ramp up his attacks. On 19th November 2024, he retweeted this to his millions of followers, followed by a compilation of attacks on Fauci on 21st November,

Neuralink

There are also questions about the management of Musk's research project, Neuralink, which involves developing a brain-computer interface to help people who are paralysed. While this is clearly a worthy goal, his approach to conducting research is characterised by refusal to let anyone interfere with how he does things. This has led to accusations of failure to adhere to regulatory procedures for Good Laboratory Practice. For instance, consider these quotes from this article: 

'I think what concerns people is that Neuralink could be cutting corners, and so far nobody has stopped them,' says Nick Ramsey, a clinical neuroscientist at University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands.  There’s an incredible push by Neuralink to bypass the conventional research world, and there’s little interaction with academics, as if they think that we’re on the wrong track—that we’re inching forward while they want to leap years forward.

In response to Musk's claim that no monkey had died because of Neuralink, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine wrote to the SEC, claiming Musk’s comments were false. The group said it had obtained veterinary records from Neuralink’s experiments showing that at least 12 young, healthy monkeys were euthanized as a result of problems with Neuralink’s implant. The group alleged that Musk’s comments are misleading investors, and urged SEC regulators to investigate Musk and Neuralink for securities fraud.

The problems with Neuralink do not stop with the ethics of the animals and the secrecy surrounding them. In a piece in Nature, various scientists were interviewed about the first human trial that was conducted earlier this year. The main concern was lack of transparency. Human trials are usually recorded in clinical.trials.gov, which was set up precisely to make it easier to track if studies had followed a protocol. Musk did not do this. His approach to the human trials again reflects his distaste for any regulations. But the regulations are there for a purpose, and one would expect a Fellow of the Royal Society to abide by them; otherwise we end up with scandals such as Theranos or the stem cell experiments by Macchiarini and Birchall. The ethics of this kind of trial also needs careful handling, especially in terms of the patient's understanding of possible adverse effects, their expectations of benefits, and the undertaking of researchers to provide long-term support for the prosthesis.

If we turn to the more general issues that come under Principles, then the Code of Conduct states: 

Fellows and Foreign Members shall not act or fail to act in any way which would undermine the Society's mission or bring the Society into disrepute.

 Here are some examples that I would regard as contrary to the Society's mission.

Promoting vaccine hesitation

The Royal Society has done good work promoting public understanding of vaccines, as with this blogpost by Charles Bangham FRS. In contrast, as described here, Musk has promoted vaccine conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine views on his platform. This Tweet had 85 million views:

Downplaying the climate emergency

In 2023 Musk played down the seriousness of climate change, and 2024 participated in a bizarre interview with Donald Trump, which dismayed climate experts. Among the commenters was Michael Mann, who said “It is sad that Elon Musk has become a climate change denier, but that’s what he is. He’s literally denying what the science has to say here.” Mann was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2024.

Spreading deep fakes and misinformation on X

As recently as 2022, the Royal Society published a report in which Frank Kelly (FRS) noted the high priority that the Royal Society gives to accurate scientific communication:

The Royal Society’s mission since it was established in 1660 has been to promote science for the benefit of humanity, and a major strand of that is to communicate accurately. But false information is interfering with that goal. It is accused of fuelling mistrust in vaccines, confusing discussions about tackling the climate crisis and influencing the debate about genetically modified crops. 

Earlier this month, Martin McKee wrote in the British Medical Journal:

 Musk’s reason for buying Twitter was to influence the social discourse. And influence he did—by using his enormous platform (203 million followers) to endorse Trump, spread disinformation about voter fraud and deep fakes of Kamala Harris, and amplify conspiracy theories about everything from vaccines to race replacement theory to misogyny.

The most recent development is the announcement that Musk is to be co-director of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, an allusion to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin) in the Trump Administration, with a brief to cut waste and bureaucracy. The future for US science is starting to look bleak, with Musk being given unfettered powers to cut budgets to NIH and NASA, among others.  This tweet, which he endorsed, indicates that rather than using objective evidence, the cuts will fall on those who have criticized Trump, who will find bowdlerized summaries of their work used to generate public outrage. The tweet reads:  "Here’s what the U.S. Government wasted $900 Billion of your tax dollars on in 2023. The Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) will fix this. America deserves leaders that prioritize sensible spending" before presenting a chart listing items for cuts, with unsourced descriptions of expenditure, including:

• Dr Fauci's monkey business on NIH's "monkey island":   $33,200,000 
• NIH's meth-head monkeys:  portion of $12,000,000 
• Dr Fauci's transgender monkey study: $477,121

I'm sad to say I agree with Alex Wild, Curator of Entomology at University of Texas Austin, who wrote a few days ago: "I hope federally funded scientists are preparing for large scale, bad faith attacks by Musk and his troll army.  It’s pretty clear the DOGE operation is going to take snippets of grant proposals and papers, present them out of context, and direct weaponized harassment of individual people."

What next?  

I've been told that in the light of the evolving situation, the Royal Society Council will look again at the case of Elon Musk. In conversations I have had with them, they emphasise that they must adhere to their own procedures, which are specified in the Statutes, and which involve a whole series of stages of legal scrutiny, committee evaluation, discussion with the Fellow in question, and ultimately a vote from the Fellowship, before a Fellow or Foreign Member could be expelled. While I agree that if you have a set of rules you should stick to them, I find the fact that nobody has been expelled for over 150 years telling. It does suggest that the Statutes are worded so that it is virtually impossible to do anything about Fellows who breach the Code of Conduct. In effect the Statutes serve a purpose of protecting the Royal Society from ever having to take action against one of its Fellows.

In the course of investigating this blogpost, I've become intimately familiar with the Code of Conduct, which requires me to "treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including ... foreign Members". I'm not willing to treat Elon Musk "collegially and with courtesy". Any pleasure I may take in the distinction of the honour of an FRS is diminished by the fact it is shared with someone who appears to be modeling himself on a Bond villain, a man who has immeasurable wealth and power which he will use to threaten scientists who disagree with him. Accordingly, last week I resigned my FRS. I don't do this in the expectation of having any impact: in the context of over 350 years of Royal Society history, this is just a blip. I just feel far more comfortable to be dissociated from an institution that continues to honour this disreputable man.

Note: Comments will be accepted if they are by a named individual, civil, and on topic. They are moderated and there may be a delay before they appear online. 

 

PS. 1st Dec 2024. It seems many people did not read this far and I have deleted a lot of anonymous comments.  I will close this post to comments now, as I think nobody has anything new to say and I don't think anything will be gained by more to and fro.  Thanks for all the support - which outnumbers criticism by about 20:1.

When there are no consequences for misconduct: Parallels between politics and science

 

Gustave Doré: Illustration for Paradise Lost

(Updated 17 Dec 2022) 

As children, we grow up with stories of the battle between good and evil, but good ultimately triumphs. In adulthood, we know things can be more complicated: bad people can get into positions of power and make everyone suffer.  And yet, we tell ourselves, we have a strong legal framework, there are checks and balances, and a political system aspires to be free and fair.

 

During the last decade, I started for the first time to have serious doubts about those assumptions. In both the UK and the US, the same pattern is seen repeatedly: the media report on a scandal involving the government or a public figure, there is a brief period of public outrage, but then things continue as before.

 

In the UK we have become accustomed to politicians lying to Parliament and failing to correct the record, to bullying by senior politicians, and to safety regulations being ignored.  The current scandal is a case of disaster capitalism where government cronies made vast fortunes from the Covid pandemic by gaining contracts for personal protective equipment – which was not only provided at inflated prices, but then could not be used as it was substandard.

 

These are all shocking stories, but even more shocking is the lack of any serious consequences for those who are guilty. In the past, politicians would have resigned for minor peccadilloes, with pressure from the Prime Minister if need be. During Boris Johnson’s premiership, however, the Prime Minister was part of the problem. 

 

During the Trump presidency in the US, Sarah Kendzior wrote about “saviour syndrome”  - the belief people had that someone would come along and put things right. As she noted: “Mr. Trump has openly committed crimes and even confessed to crimes: What is at stake is whether anyone would hold him accountable.” And, sadly, the answer has been no.

 

No consequences for scientific fraud

So what has this got to do with science?  Well, I get the same sinking feeling that there is a major problem, everyone can see there's a problem, but nobody is going to rescue us. Researchers who engage in obvious malpractice repeatedly get away with no consequences.  This has been a recurring theme from those who have exposed academic papermills (Byrne et al., 2021) and/or reported manipulation of figures in journal articles (Bik et al., 2016).  For instance, when Bik was interviewed by Nature, she noted that 60-70% of the 800 papers she had reported to journals had not been dealt with within 5 years. That matches my more limited experience; if one points out academic malpractice to publishers or institutions, there is often no reply. Those who do reply typically say they will investigate, but then you hear no more.

 

At a recent symposium on Research Integrity at Liverpool Medical Institution*, David Sanders (Purdue University) told of repeated experiences of being given the brush-off by journals and institutions when reporting suspect papers. For instance, he reported an article that had simply recycled a table from a previous paper on a different topic. The response was “We will look into it”. “What”, said David incredulously, “is there to look into?”. This is the concern – that there can be blatant evidence of malpractice within a paper, yet the complainant is ignored. In this case, nothing happened. There are honorable exceptions, but it seems shocking that serious and obvious errors in work are not dealt with in a prompt and professional manner.

 

At the same seminar, there was a searing presentation by Peter Wilmshurst, whose experiences of exposing medical fraud by powerful individuals and organisations have led him to be the subject of numerous libel complaints.  Here are a few details of two of the cases he presented:

 

Paolo Macchiarini:  Convicted in 2022 of causing bodily harm with an experimental transplant of a synthetic windpipe that he performed between 2011-2012.  Wilmshurst noted that the descriptions of the experimental surgery in journals were incorrect. For a summary see this BMJ article.   A 2008 paper by Macchiarini and colleagues is still published in the Lancet, despite demands for it to be retracted. 

 

Don Poldermans: An eminent cardiologist who conducted a series of studies on perioperative betablockers, leading them to be recommended in guidelines from the European Society of Cardiology,  whose task force he chaired. A meta-analysis challenged that conclusion, showing mortality increased; an investigation found that work by Poldermans had serious integrity problems, and he was fired. Nevertheless, the papers have not been retracted. Wilmshurst estimated that thousands of deaths would have resulted from physicians following the guidelines recommending betablockers.

 

The week before the Liverpool meeting, there was a session on Correcting the Record at AIMOS2022.  The four speakers, John Loadsman (anaesthesiology), Ben Mol (Obstetrics and Gynecology), Lisa Parker (Oncology) and Jana Christopher (image integrity) covered the topic from a range of different angles, but in every single talk, the message came through loud and clear: it’s not enough to flag up cases of fraud – you have to then get someone to act on them, and that is far more difficult than it should be.

 

And then on the same day as the Liverpool meeting, Le Monde ran a piece about a researcher whose body of work contained numerous problems: the same graphs were used across different articles that purported to show different experiments, and other figures had signs of manipulation.  There was an investigation by the institution and by the funder, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), which concluded that there had been several breaches of scientific integrity. However, it seems that the recommendation was simply that the papers should be “corrected”.

 

Why is scientific fraud not taken seriously?

There are several factors that conspire to get scientific fraud brushed under the carpet.

1.     Accusations of fraud may be unfounded. In science, as in politics, there may be individuals or organisations who target people unfairly – either for personal reasons, or because they don’t like their message. Furthermore, everyone makes mistakes and it would be dangerous to vilify researchers for honest errors. So it is vital to do due diligence and establish the facts. In practice, however, this typically means giving the accused the benefit of the doubt, even when the evidence of misconduct is strong.  While it is not always easy to demonstrate intent, there are many cases, such as those noted above, where a pattern of repeated transgressions is evident in published papers – and yet nothing is done.  

2.     Conflict of interest. Institutions may be reluctant to accept that someone is fraudulent if that person occupies a high-ranking role in the organisation, especially if they bring in grant income. Worries about reputational risk also create conflict of interest. The Printeger project is a set of case studies of individual research misconduct cases, which illustrates just how inconsistently these are handled in different countries, especially with regard to transparency vs confidentiality of process. It concluded “The reflex of research organisations to immediately contain and preferably minimise misconduct
cases is remarkable”.

3.     Passing the buck. Publishers may be reluctant to retract papers unless there is an institutional finding of misconduct, even if there is clear evidence that the published work is wrong. I discussed this here.  My view is that leaving flawed research in the public record is analogous to a store selling poisoned cookies to customers – you have a responsibility to correct the record as soon as possible when the evidence is clear to avoid harm to consumers. Funders might be expected to also play a role in correcting the record when research they have funded is shown to be flawed. Where public money is concerned, funders surely have a moral responsibility to ensure it is not wasted on fraudulent or sloppy research. Yet in her introduction to the Liverpool seminar, Patricia Murray noted that the new UK Committee on Research Integrity (CORI) does not regard investigation of research misconduct as within its purview.  

4.     Concerns about litigation. Organisations often have concerns that they will be sued if they make investigations of misconduct public, even if they are confident that misconduct occurred. These concerns are justified, as can be seen from the lawsuits that most of the sleuths who spoke at AIMOS and Liverpool have been subjected to.  My impression is that, provided there is clear evidence of misconduct, the fraudsters typically lose libel actions, but I’d be interested in more information on that point.

 

 

Consequences when misconduct goes unpunished

 

The lack of consequences for misconduct has many corrosive impacts on society. 

 

1.     Political and scientific institutions can only operate properly if there is trust. If lack of integrity is seen to be rewarded, this erodes public confidence. 

 

2.     People depend on us getting things right. We are confronting major challenges to health and to our environment. If we can’t trust researchers to be honest, then we all suffer as scientific progress stalls.  Over-hyped findings that make it into the literature can lead subsequent generations of researchers to waste time pursuing false leads.  Ultimately, people are harmed if we don’t fix fraud.

 

3.     Misconduct leads to waste of resources. It is depressing to think of all the research that could have been supported by the funds that have been spent on fraudulent studies.

 

4.     People engage in misconduct because in a competitive system, it brings them personal benefits, in terms of prestige, tenure, power and salary. If the fraudsters are not tackled, they end up in positions of power, where they will perpetuate a corrupt system; it is not in their interests to promote those who might challenge them.

 

5.     The new generation entering the profession will become cynical if they see that one needs to behave corruptly in order to succeed. They are left with the stark choice of joining in the corruption or leaving the field.

 

 

What can be done?

 

There’s no single solution, but I think there are several actions that are needed to help clean up the mess.

 

1.     Appreciate the scale of the problem.

When fraud is talked about in scientific circles, you typically get the response that “fraud is rare” and “science is self-correcting”.  A hole has been blown in the first assumption by the emergence of industrial-scale fraud in the form of academic paper-mills . The large publishers are now worried enough about this to be taking concerted action to detect papermill activity, and some of them have engaged in mass retractions of fraudulent work (see, e.g. the case of IEEE retractions here). Yet, I have documented on PubPeer numerous new papermill articles in Hindawi special issues appearing since September of this year, when the publisher announced it would be engaging in retraction of 500 papers. It’s as if the publisher is trying to clean up with a mop while a fire-hose is spewing out fraudulent content.  This kind of fraud is different from that reported by Wilmshurst, but it illustrates just how slow the business of correcting the scientific record can be – even when the evidence for fraud is unambiguous. 

Publishers trying to mop up papermill outputs

 

Yes, self-correction will ultimately happen in science, when people find they cannot replicate the flawed research on which they try to build. But the time-scale for such self-correction is often far longer than it needs to be.  We have to understand just how much waste of time and money is caused by reliance on a passive, natural evolution of self-correction, rather than a more proactive system to root out fraud.  

 

2.     Full transparency

There’s been a fair bit of debate about open data, and now it is recognised that we also need open code (scripts to generate figures etc.) to properly evaluate results. I would go further, though, and say we also need open peer review. This need not mean that the peer reviewer is identified, but just that their report is available for others to read. I have found open peer reviews very useful in identifying papermill products.

 

3.     Develop shared standards

Organisations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) give recommendations for editors about how to respond when an accusation of misconduct occurs.  Although this looks like a start in specifying standards to which reputable journals should adhere, several speakers at the AIMOS meeting suggested that COPE guidelines were not suited for dealing with papermills and could actually delay and obfuscate investigations. Furthermore, COPE has no regulatory power and publishers are under no obligation to follow the guidelines (even if they state they will do so).

 

4.     National bodies for promoting scientific integrity

The Printeger project (cited above) noted that “A typical reaction of a research organisation facing unfamiliar research misconduct without appropriate procedures is to set up ad hoc investigative committees, usually consisting of in-house senior researchers…. Generally, this does not go well.”

In response to some high-profile cases that did not go well, some countries have set up national bodies for promoting scientific integrity. These are growing in number, but those who report cases to them often complain that they are not much help when fraud is discovered – sometimes this is because they lack the funding to defend a legal challenge. But, as with shared standards, this is at least a start, and they may help gather data on the scale and nature of the problem.  

 

5.     Transparent discussion of breaches of research integrity

Perhaps the most effective way of persuading institutions, publishers and funders to act is by publicising when they have failed to respond adequately to complaints.  David Sanders described a case where journals and institutions took no action despite multiple examples of image manipulation and plagiarism from one lab.  He only got a response when the case was featured in the New York Times.

Nevertheless, as the Printeger project noted, relying on the media to highlight fraud is far from ideal – there can a tendency to sensationalise and simplify the story, with potential for disproportionate damage to both accused and whistleblowers. If we had trustworthy and official channels to report suspected research misconduct, then whistleblowers would be less likely to seek publicity through other means.

 

6.     Protect whistleblowers

In her introduction to the Liverpool Research Integrity seminar, Patricia Murray noted the lack of consistency in institutional guidelines on research integrity. In some cases, the approach to whistleblowers seemed hostile, with the guidelines emphasising that they would be guilty of misconduct if they were found to have made frivolous, vexatious and/or malicious allegations. This, of course, is fair enough, but it needs to be countered by recommendations that allow for whistleblowers who are none of these things, who are doing the institution a service by casting light on serious problems. Indeed, Prof Murray noted that in her institution, failure to report an incident that gives reasonable suspicion of research misconduct is itself regarded as misconduct.  At present, whistleblowers are often treated as nuisances or cranks who need to be shut down. As was evident from the cases of both Sanders and Wilmshurst, they are at risk of litigation, and careers may be put in jeopardy if they challenge senior figures.

 

7.     Changing the incentive structure in science

It’s well-appreciated that if you really want to stop a problem, you should understand what causes it and stop it at source. People do fraudulent research because the potential benefits are large and the costs seem negligible.  We can change that balance by, on the one hand having serious and public sanctions for those who commit fraud, and on the other hand, rewarding scientists who emphasise integrity, transparency and accuracy in their work, rather than those that get flashy, eyecatching results.

 

I'm developing my ideas on this topic and I welcome thoughts on these suggestions. Comments are moderated and so do not appear immediately, but I will post any that are on topic and constructive.  

Update 17th December 2022  

Jennifer Byrne suggested one further recommendation, as follows:

To change the incentive structure in scientific publishing. Journals are presently rewarded for publishing, as publishing drives both income (through subscriptions and/or open access charges) and the journal impact factor. In contrast, journals and publishers do not earn income and are not otherwise rewarded for correcting the literature that they publish. This means that the (seemingly rare) journals that work hard to correct, flag and retract erroneous papers are rewarded identically to journals that appear to do very little. Proactive journals appear to represent a minority, but while there are no incentives for journals to take a proactive approach to published errors and misinformation, it should not be surprising that few journals join their efforts. Until publication and correction are recognized as two sides of the same coin, and valued as such, it seems inevitable that we will see a continued drive towards publishing more and correcting very little, or continuing to value publication quantity over quality.

 

Bibliography 

I'll also add here additional resources. I'm certainly not the first to have made the points in this post, and it may be useful to have other articles gathered together in one place.  

 

Besançon, L., Bik, E., Heathers, J., & Meyerowitz-Katz, G. (2022). Correction of scientific literature: Too little, too late! PLOS Biology, 20(3), e3001572. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001572   

 

Byrne, J. A., Park, Y., Richardson, R. A. K., Pathmendra, P., Sun, M., & Stoeger, T. (2022). Protection of the human gene research literature from contract cheating organizations known as research paper mills. Nucleic Acids Research, gkac1139. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkac1139 

 

Christian, K., Larkins, J., & Doran, M. R. (2022). The Australian academic STEMM workplace post-COVID: a picture of disarray. BioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.06.519378 

 

Lévy, R. (2022, December 15). Is it somebody else’s problem to correct the scientific literature? Rapha-z-Lab. https://raphazlab.wordpress.com/2022/12/15/is-it-somebody-elses-problem-to-correct-the-scientific-literature/ 

 

Research misconduct: Theory & Pratico – For Better Science. (n.d.). Retrieved 17 December 2022, from https://forbetterscience.com/2022/08/31/research-misconduct-theory-pratico/   

Star marine ecologist committed misconduct, university says. (n.d.). Retrieved 17 December 2022, from https://www.science.org/content/article/star-marine-ecologist-committed-misconduct-university-says  

Additions on 18th December: Yet more relevant stuff coming to my attention! 

 

Naudet, Florian (2022) Lecture: Busting two zombie trials in a post-COVID world.   

 

Wilmshurst, Peter (2022) Blog: Has COPE membership become a way for unprincipled journals to buy a fake badge of integrity?

 *Addition on 20th December

Liverpool Medical Institution seminar on Research Integrity: The introduction by Patricia Murray, talk by Peter Wilmshurt, and Q&A are now available on Youtube.

And finally.... 

A couple of sobering thoughts:

 

Alexander Trevelyan on Twitter noted  a great quote from the anonymous @mumumouse (author of Research misconduct blogpost above): “To imagine what it’s like to be a whistleblower in the science community, imagine you are trying to report a Ponzi scheme, but instead of receiving help you are told, nonchalantly, to call Bernie Madoff, if you wish." 

 

Peter Wilmshurst started his talk by relaying a conversation with Patricia Murray in the run-up to his talk. He said he planned to talk about the 3 Fs, fabrication, falsification and honesty.

 To which Patricia replied, “There is no F in honesty”. 

(This may take a few moments to appreciate).

 

 

WeSpeechies: A meeting point on Twitter

As an avid Twitter user, I'm always interested in new developments in social media, and so I was intrigued when Caroline Bowen (@speech_woman) and Bronwyn Hemsley (@bronwynhemsley) invited me to curate a session of @WeSpeechies for a week.

I said yes immediately, though I had no real idea (and still have no real idea) of what I was getting myself into. But I knew that Caroline had done an enormous amount to encourage 'Speechies' (i.e., Speech and Language Therapists in the UK/Speech-Language Pathologists elsewhere) to use the internet. In 1998, she started a web-based resource: this is a mine of useful information, including links to assessments, interventions and evidence-based information.

I'm not a speechie myself –  I'm a full-time researcher with a Principal Research Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and my background is neuropsychology -   but I've always worked closely with the profession, because of my interest in children's communication impairments. So it's great to have the opportunity to interact with those who work at the coalface, and @WeSpeechies seems like a great idea.

But how does it work? Well, there's a description here.

In brief, the idea is that the Twitter handle @wespeechies is taken over by someone – the 'curator' – for a week, with the idea that they can foster interesting exchanges on Twitter. What's more, the interactions can be preserved: this can be helped if those interacting with @wespeechies remember to add the hashtag #WeSpeechies to their tweets.This way we can build an archive of useful and interesting interactions.

Now, of course, most of us are not glued to Twitter all day, even though we may give that impression, and there can be difficulties in interacting across time zones. As curator, I plan to check in a couple of times every day during the week to respond to tweets, but Caroline and Bronwyn wanted also to ensure that there is an opportunity for some live chat. They therefore include in the course of the week a "Tuesday Chat", which involves me chairing a Q&A session. Caroline and Bronwyn have kindly given me an easy topic for my first attempt, namely Apprehensive Academics on Twitter – inspired by this blogpost.

I'm going to do this at 8 to 9 in the morning on Tuesday 15th April 2014 on British Standard Time. This means that the live chat should appeal to night owls in North America, and larks in UK and Europe, whereas for those in Australasia it will be afternoon or early evening.

If you'd like to take part, please feel free to respond to any message from @wespeechies, and remember to include #WeSpeechies in your message. I've generated some questions to get the ball rolling; if you want to answer one of these, please make it clear which one by including, for instance, A1, A2, A3 etc at the start of your Tweet.

Q1 What makes for an effective/ineffective tweet? #WeSpeechies

Q2 Have you got any tips for attracting followers? #WeSpeechies

Q3 Are there downsides to Twitter? #WeSpeechies 

Q4 What unexpected benefits of Twitter have you found?  #WeSpeechies

Q5 Does your employer have an issue or policy on staff being on Twitter, that you know about?  #WeSpeechies

Please note that the idea of #WeSpeechies is to engage and connect with those who work as SALTs/SLPs or who have shared interests in problems affecting communication and/or swallowing. You don't need to be an expert – on the contrary, part of the fun of the exercise is that we can all share experiences and maybe learn something new. The hope is that, if you take part, you may find new contacts around the globe: people with shared interests who can make you feel more of a world-wide community.

A final note of warning: WeSpeechies does not encourage advertisers, spammers or trolls. It is not the place to try and sell or endorse a product. Anyone who does not abide by the basic @WeSpeechies guidelines will be warned and then blocked if the advertising or unsuitable promo Tweets continue.

from geek-and-poke.com

If you are interested in speechie issues, I do hope you will participate by following @WeSpeechies. I'll be taking over the twitter handle on Sunday 13th April for a week, so look forward to meeting you there!

P.S. 15th April 2014
The Live Chat was fun, if somewhat frenetic.
If you missed it, you can see the tweets collated here:
 http://bit.ly/1qY5s0W