Scientific misconducts raise many legal issues. How to deal with them is not always clear, and we have faced many difficulties to build up this project. Here are some questions that have been raised, and the positions our website is based upon. Feel free to discuss these issues on the corresponding blog posts.

1. How to use the term “misconduct”?

One of the difficulties to address the issue of scientific misconduct at the international level stems from the wide diversity of definitions and procedures among countries and institutions.

On this website, we only consider cases that:
(i) have been considered as "misconduct" by institutions; in this case we recommend the reader to refer to the corresponding definition of misconduct;
(ii) consist in a behaviour that is explicitly defined as misconduct by some institutions (e.g. plagiarism, as defined by the ORI);
(iii) are contrary to explicit rules, such as publishing policies (e.g. non-declared conflict of interest), which is most of the time considered to be a misconduct by institutions.

2. What is an assessment of misconduct?

Ways to deal with misconduct also greatly vary between institutions and countries, and with the kind of misconduct involved. For instance, cases of falsification can be dealt with within a university, following an investigation procedure specific to the university. Cases of non-declared conflict of interest or undeserved authorship are more likely to be dealt with by journal editors. Therefore, different kinds of documents report cases of misconduct.

On this website, assessments include:
(i) report of an investigation;
(ii) letter from the authors who admit their misconduct (for instance, published in a journal);
(iii) on-site review published in journals.

Since it is not possible to make an exhaustive list of all the institutions from which we accept assessments of misconduct, please find here the types of institutions we considered as legitimate, following recommendations from the ESF.

3. To which extent are these assessments available and public?

There is no general rule, each institution decides whether it makes such documents available. For instance, the NIH, via the ORI, makes reports available on the Internet during 3 years after the assessment, whereas the NSF keeps all this information private. The question of whether this information should be public is not easy. For instance, in France, legal judgments are generally public but anonymous. In research, it could be argued that disclosure of the name of the researcher that misbehaved can ruin his/her career. However, as long as misconduct concerns the reliability of scientific publications, making a judgment anonymous means refusing to disclose which publication is unreliable. How then to base one’s research project on scientific literature?

This website only refers to information that is already available on the Internet, and provides links to this information. Again, we insist on the fact that that this information focuses on scientific publications and not on their authors.

4. Shall the name of the authors responsible of misconduct be shown?

Please refer to the corresponding section for this question. This website does not focus on the person responsible of misconduct: the name of this person is only available on the assessments of misconduct (which are linked to the publications listed on this website) in some cases.
However, since scientific articles are always associated with the names of their authors on any online database, it appears impossible to mention an article associated with misconduct while preserving the anonymity of the authors.

5. Are the authors informed that one of their article is registered in the database? If yes, what is the procedure?

Before adding a publication into the database, an email is sent to the corresponding author(s), according to the recommendations of the CNIL. To do so, we use the email(s) indicated in the publications, although they may have change. Any demand from the corresponding author(s) will be taken into consideration. In absence of any answer to the email within two weeks from the sending date, the publication(s) will be registered on the website.

6. How to avoid defamation?

In general, defamation requires several criteria:
(i) a statement targets an individual and gives a negative image of him/her;
(ii) this statement is false;
(iii) the person who makes this statement is aware that it is false;
(iv) the statement refers to the person (and not of his/her work for instance);
(v) the person does not have the possibility of replying to the statement.

Indeed, legislation and jurisprudence vary between countries. However, here we focus on the scientific content of the publications, and do not judge their authors.

7. What is the position of this website regarding legislations of different countries?

The website is hosted in France and therefore is under French legislation.

8. Do we have to deal with the copyright of the publications?

On this website, only references to the publications are available, not the publications themselves.