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High Price to Pay for Misconduct Investigations
from Nature News
Investigations into research misconduct cost US institutions more than US$110 million per year, estimates a study published this week. But experts contacted by Nature question whether calculating the cost of investigation is the right way to measure the impact of research misconduct.
The research, published in PLoS Medicine, is based on the costs of a single recent case of research misconduct at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. In the case, a senior scientist was accused of fabricating data in at least one grant application, and an internal investigation reached a conclusion of research misconduct.
As the work was partly funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services, the matter was referred to the department's Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which has yet to close the case or name the researcher involved. But the length and complexity of the investigation has already motivated Arthur Michalek, the institute's senior vice-president for educational affairs, biostatistician Alan Hutson and their colleagues to try to tally the costs.
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