Preventing and managing research misconduct: the experience of the CNR Research Ethics and Integrity Committee

The prevention and management of research misconducts and other irresponsible practices is a crucial issue for research integrity and for a public research institution such as the National Research Council of Italy. To date, a wide range of paradigms and methodologies exist to manage such cases or promote integrity. Amidst such plethora of approaches, it has become increasingly important to identify the best practices that have gradually emerged as the most effective ones. To this end, in this talk, we present a set of practical insights based on the experience gathered in the last ten years by the Research Ethics and Integrity Committee appointed by the CNR President and, in particular, in the last four years by the “Research Integrity Unit” (RIU) of the Committee’s Scientific Secretariat. The CNR has been the first Italian institution with codified procedures for the analysis and evaluation of alleged research misconducts. Furthermore, the Committee has also been the first in Italy to publish detailed guidelines for research integrity. This talk includes three parts. In the first, we briefly describe the two RIU objectives, namely the preventive and post-publication analysis of scientific articles submitted or published by CNR researchers. In the second part, then, we detail the procedures and informatics tools employed in the analysis of presumed cases of research misconduct in order to evaluate images/data/texts. Finally, we conclude by distilling a set of best practices that, based on our experience, ought to guide the management of alleged cases of research misconduct, and by describing the training modules dedicated to CNR researchers on this topic.