First, Do Some Harm, Part IV: Fake Submission to Fake Conference Yields Fake Charge of Misconduct

Professor Jim Vander Putten, who spent six years as chair of the University of Arkansas Little Rock (UALR) IRB, is now charged with violating university rules by conducting research without that board’s approval. The case highlights several problems with the current system, most notably its failure to provide standards for studies designed to expose misbehavior.

[Peter Schmidt, “A Scholar’s Sting of Education Conferences Stirs a Hornet’s Nest,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 14, 2016, paywalled.]

David Wright: OASH "is secretive, autocratic and unaccountable."

David Wright has resigned as director of the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Research Integrity. In his letter of resignation, obtained by Science Insider, Wright blames a dysfunctional Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH), which also houses OHRP.

[Kaiser, Joceyln. "Top U.S. Scientific Misconduct Official Quits in Frustration With Bureaucracy." Science Insider, March 12, 2014.]

On Signing the Markingson Petition

By April 1942, the Pentagon was 40 percent over budget, partly because it had been enlarged since first approved, but mostly because the original estimate of $35 million had never been realistic. Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell delayed telling Congress, but in June he finally sent Colonel Leslie Groves to appear before a House Apppropriations subcommittee.

Can an IRB Ban a Researcher?

In July, the Sacramento Bee reported that the University of California, Davis, had ordered two doctors--J. Paul Muizelaar and Dr. Rudolph J. Schrot--"to halt all human research activity 'except as necessary to protect the safety and welfare of research participants.'" Schrot told the Bee that "To be banned from clinical research makes a career in academic medicine challenging, to say the least."

The Common Rule (45 CFR 46.113) empowers IRBs to "suspend or terminate approval of research that is not being conducted in accordance with the IRB's requirements or that has been associated with unexpected serious harm to subjects," but it does not explicitly empower them to ban a researcher from all research.

Who Should Investigate Research Misconduct?

Two recent items do not directly involve IRBs, but they raise broader issues of accountability for research misconduct.

[Erin O'Connor and Maurice Black, "Save Academic Freedom," Inside Higher Ed, 28 February 2011; Alice Dreger, "Darkness's Descent on the American Anthropological Association: A Cautionary Tale," Human Nature (published online 16 February 2011).]

Unfair IRBs Provoke Misbehavior

"Researchers who perceive that they are being unfairly treated are less likely to report engaging in 'ideal' behaviors and more likely to report misbehavior and misconduct," according to a survey of faculty at fifty top research universities in the United States.

[Brian C. Martinson, A. Lauren Crain, Raymond De Vries, Melissa S. Anderson, "The Importance of Organizational Justice in Ensuring Research Integrity," Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics 5, no. 3. (Sep 2010): 67–83.]

As the authors note, this is mostly a quantitative confirmation of earlier findings. Most relevant for this blog, they cite a 2005 article by Patricia Keith-Spiegel and Gerald P. Koocher that found that "The efforts of some institutional review boards (IRBs) to exercise what is viewed as appropriate oversight may contribute to deceit on the part of investigators who feel unjustly treated."

Like the Singer and Couper article in the same issue, this article presents a mass of quantitative data in a difficult form. Let me suggest that the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics invest some money in decent graphs.