by Suzanne M. Rivera, Ph.D.

I was giving a workshop presentation at the annual meeting of the National Council of University Research Administrators and my co-presenter raised an interesting idea. Tommy Coggins of the University of South Carolina was talking about the importance of integrity for preserving the public’s trust in the research enterprise, and he pointed out that, unlike physicians, attorneys, and accountants, researchers do not have a unifying professional code of ethics.  Instead, they are subject to a patchwork of regulations, policies and laws, most of which were promulgated by grant funding agencies and therefore are enforceable only in cases where tax payer dollars are involved.  Although discipline-specific societies, such as the American Psychological Association, have their own ethics codes, researchers as a profession are not asked to adhere to a shared set of standards for their conduct.

And it’s true— there is no unifying code that all researchers (spanning the range of disciplines from anthropology to zoology) must swear to uphold.  And maybe it’s not realistic to expect that people whose jobs entail such a variety of different activities (working with data sets, lasers, yeast, mice, human participants, super colliders, etc.) could find sufficient common ground on which to cobble together a code.  But I wonder if it’s worth a try.  Given the current atmosphere of distrust that has resulted in new rules for increased transparency and oversight of researchers’ financial interests, perhaps the time is right to think explicitly about ethical standards for research.  Not merely avoiding “FFP” misconduct, but an affirmative duty to behave with integrity.

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