Designing integrated research integrity training: authorship, publication, and peer review

This paper describes the experience of an academic institution, the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), developing training courses about research integrity practices in authorship, publication, and Journal Peer Review. The importance of providing research integrity training in these areas is now widely accepted; however, it remains an open question how best to conduct this training. For this reason, it is vital for institutions, journals, and peak bodies to share learnings. We describe how we have collaborated across our institution to develop training that supports QUT’s principles and which is in line with insights from contemporary research on best practices in learning design, universal design, and faculty involvement. We also discuss how we have refined these courses iteratively over time, and consider potential mechanisms for evaluating the effectiveness of the courses more formally. Background The idea that institutions ought to provide researchers with formal training in research integrity is now generally accepted. How best to conduct research integrity training, however, is a contested issue [1–5]. One option is to provide research integrity training by way of “standalone” courses or units, covering a broad range of responsible research practices. The United States Office of Research Integrity (ORI) recommends that training should encompass nine core instructional areas: (1) research misconduct, (2) protection of human subjects, (3) welfare of laboratory animals, (4) conflicts of interest, (5) data management practices, (6) responsibilities of mentors and trainees, (7) collaborative research, (8) Authorship and Publication, and (9) peer review [6]. One option is to train all of these together in a single standalone course. Our institution has a comprehensive online course that does just that, and there are some advantages to this approach. It ensures that all researchers who have undertaken the course are familiar with their responsibilities across all of the core areas. Moreover, training in this way mirrors the structure of national codes governing responsible research practices and allows institutions and researchers to demonstrate their commitment to comprehensive research integrity training and to satisfy the requirements of certain funding bodies. However, it is not clear that the “standalone” training method is sufficient to teach research integrity effectively or to promote an institutional culture that truly values the responsible conduct of research. Research integrity training is not a “vaccine” to be administered just once [7]. A single training experience is insufficient to instil ethics training in a lasting way [1] and “outsourcing” ethics training to a single course risks sending a negative message that “education is developed... with an eye to expedience rather than excellence” and is therefore not valued by the institution [8]. This paper describes the first 2 years of our institution’s experience attempting to move beyond the single standalone training method to an “integrated training method” wherein various topics in research integrity are addressed separately, framed in the context of researchers’ goals and QUT’s goals to promote responsible research practices, and integrated with other forms of research training. To date, we have developed two such courses. In the first, we have integrated content about a researcher’s responsibilities with respect to Authorship * Correspondence: [email protected] Queensland University of Technology, QLD, Brisbane, Australia Research Integrity and Peer Review © The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Hooper et al. Research Integrity and Peer Review (2018) 3:2 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-018-0046-2