Australia's research integrity system is weak and inconsistent. How can we fix it?

Consider this: A researcher, formerly employed at a major Australian university, has accrued seven retractions since the beginning of 2022. Each of these retracted papers contained image duplications, whereby images were used twice to misrepresent experiments.

And yet, you can know nothing about how the case was investigated at the university where the researcher worked. The university has never made a public statement about the unreliable research that was performed there, nor revealed the findings of their in-house investigation. In fact, that investigation dragged out for multiple years. In the meantime, the researcher disappeared for months, before reappearing in the same field of research, at another institute overseas, teaching on the very same topic of their flawed research. We only know about the retractions because of the journals publishing retraction notices.

However, the investigation is hush hush. You don't know about this case because there is no obligation from the university to tell you about it. If you request information about the investigation, the university FOI officers shut it down because they claim, it is not in the public interest. And those investigations rely on a system of self-regulation – universities investigate their own researchers after claims of misconduct, in-house and completely shielded from public view.

When they make – or rather, if they make – a finding of misconduct, they have no obligation to tell the public. They have no obligation to do much at all.

This is one of several cases of research integrity investigations in Australia that exposes weakness in the system. There are many who have been arguing this case for years: A report by the Australia Institute in 2023 noted the current system was inadequate and recommended that Australia establish its own "free-standing, government-funded research integrity watchdog with investigatory powers". And Australian universities and researchers have been grappling with this idea for some time, with many voices in agreement that some sort of national oversight body is required. But progress has been slow – and seems to have stalled entirely.

Against that backdrop comes a recent paper, co-authored by Jason Chin and Rebekah McWhirter, researchers at ANU's College of Law. The paper presents another glum view of Australia's research integrity landscape, headlined "New evidence of weakness and inconsistency in the regulation of research misconduct in Australia". It sounds... miserable, but at the same time, the paper offers a couple of pathways forward, describing small changes that could strengthen this strained system. Hope, you might even say!

The paper focuses on the Group of Eight (Go8) universities, where the bulk of Australia’s academic research occurs. Chin and McWhirter looked at the policies these universities have instituted to investigate allegations of research misconduct, as well as scouring a legal database for workplace disputes that reached the Fair Work Commission in Australia and related to research misconduct.

The take-home messages are pretty simple. The duo write that "the Australian approach to research regulation is not meeting the mark when it comes to promoting the visible detection and correction of errors in the research record" and find that institutes lack the expertise to conduct these investigations.

This is not ideal when research integrity issues – such as fraud and fabrication and plagiarism – seem to be more common than ever. Maybe we're better at detecting it now, or maybe these problems have really increased, as pressure mounts on researchers to publish and peer review processes are hamstrung. And with AI... well...

"It's increasingly easy to falsify or completely fabricate research findings," says Chin. "Like many people, I'm sort of disposed to being concerned and wanting to improve those things."

So how can we improve those things?