Questionable research practices in competitive grant funding: A survey.

There has been a surge of interest in research integrity over the last decade, with a wide range of studies investigating the prevalence of questionable research practices (QRPs). However, nearly all these studies focus on research design, data collection and analysis, and hardly any empirical research has been done on the occurrence of QRPs in the context of research funding. To fill this gap, we conducted a cross-sectional pre-registered survey of applicants, reviewers and panel members from the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO), one of the main funding agencies in Belgium. We developed a bespoke survey and further refined it through feedback from experienced researchers and a pilot study. We asked how often respondents had engaged in a series of QRPs over the last ten years. A total of 1748 emails were sent, inviting recipients to participate in the survey, complemented by featuring the survey in the FWO newsletter. This resulted in 704 complete responses. Our results indicate that such QRPs are remarkably prevalent. Of the 496 participants who answered both the applicant and reviewer track, more than 60% responded that they engaged regularly in at least one of such practices, and around 40% indicated that they engaged at least occasionally in half of the QRPs queried. Only 12% reported not to have engaged in any of the QRPs. Contrary to our hypotheses, male respondents did not self-report to engage in the QRPs more often than female respondents, nor was there an association between the prevalence of QRPs and self-reported success rate in grant funding. Furthermore, half of the respondents indicated that they doubted the reliability of the grant peer review process more often than not. These results suggest that preventive action is needed, and provide new reasons to reconsider the practice of allocating research money through grant peer review.

Widespread support for a global species list with a formal governance system.

Taxonomic data are a scientific common. Unlike nomenclature, which has strong governance institutions, there are currently no generally accepted governance institutions for the compilation of taxonomic data into an accepted global list. This gap results in challenges for conservation, ecological research, policymaking, international trade, and other areas of scientific and societal importance. Consensus on a global list and its management requires effective governance and standards, including agreed mechanisms for choosing among competing taxonomies and partial lists. However, governance frameworks are currently lacking, and a call for governance in 2017 generated critical responses. Any governance system to which compliance is voluntary requires a high level of legitimacy and credibility among those by and for whom it is created. Legitimacy and credibility, in turn, require adequate and credible consultation. Here, we report on the results of a global survey of taxonomists, scientists from other disciplines, and users of taxonomy designed to assess views and test ideas for a new system of taxonomic list governance. We found a surprisingly high degree of agreement on the need for a global list of accepted species and their names, and consistent views on what such a list should provide to users and how it should be governed. The survey suggests that consensus on a mechanism to create, manage, and govern a single widely accepted list of all the world's species is achievable. This finding was unexpected given past controversies about the merits of list governance.

Grant writing and grant peer review as questionable research practices.

A large part of governmental research funding is currently distributed through the peer review of project proposals. In this paper, we argue that such funding systems incentivize and even force researchers to violate five moral values, each of which is central to commonly used scientific codes of conduct. Our argument complements existing epistemic arguments against peer-review project funding systems and, accordingly, strengthens the mounting calls for reform of these systems.

Enzyme classification and the entanglement of values and epistemic standards.

This paper investigates the case of enzyme classification to evaluate different ideals for regulating values in science. I show that epistemic and non-epistemic considerations are inevitably and untraceably entangled in enzyme classification, and argue that this has significant implications for the two main kinds of views on values in science, namely, Epistemic Priority Views and Joint Satisfaction Views. More precisely, I argue that the case of enzyme classification poses a problem for the usability and descriptive accuracy of these two views. The paper ends by suggesting that these two views provide different but complementary perspectives, and that both are useful for evaluating values in science.

Principles for creating a single authoritative list of the world's species.

Lists of species underpin many fields of human endeavour, but there are currently no universally accepted principles for deciding which biological species should be accepted when there are alternative taxonomic treatments (and, by extension, which scientific names should be applied to those species). As improvements in information technology make it easier to communicate, access, and aggregate biodiversity information, there is a need for a framework that helps taxonomists and the users of taxonomy decide which taxa and names should be used by society whilst continuing to encourage taxonomic research that leads to new species discoveries, new knowledge of species relationships, and the refinement of existing species concepts. Here, we present 10 principles that can underpin such a governance framework, namely (i) the species list must be based on science and free from nontaxonomic considerations and interference, (ii) governance of the species list must aim for community support and use, (iii) all decisions about list composition must be transparent, (iv) the governance of validated lists of species is separate from the governance of the names of taxa, (v) governance of lists of accepted species must not constrain academic freedom, (vi) the set of criteria considered sufficient to recognise species boundaries may appropriately vary between different taxonomic groups but should be consistent when possible, (vii) a global list must balance conflicting needs for currency and stability by having archived versions, (viii) contributors need appropriate recognition, (ix) list content should be traceable, and (x) a global listing process needs both to encompass global diversity and to accommodate local knowledge of that diversity. We conclude by outlining issues that must be resolved if such a system of taxonomic list governance and a unified list of accepted scientific names generated are to be universally adopted.

Taxonomy and conservation science: interdependent and value-laden.

The relation between conservation science and taxonomy is typically seen as a simple dependency of the former on the latter. This dependency is assumed to be strictly one-way to avoid normative concerns from conservation science inappropriately affecting the descriptive discipline of taxonomy. In this paper, I argue against this widely assumed standard view on the relation between these two disciplines by highlighting two important roles for conservation scientists in scientific decisions that are part of the internal stages of taxonomy. I show that these roles imply that the two disciplines should be interdependent and that value-judgments should play a substantial role in both.

Radical pluralism, classificatory norms and the legitimacy of species classifications.

Moderate pluralism is a popular position in contemporary philosophy of biology. Despite its popularity, various authors have argued that it tends to slide off into a radical form of pluralism that is both normatively and descriptively unacceptable. This paper looks at the case of biological species classification, and evaluates a popular way of avoiding radical pluralism by relying on the shared aims and norms of a discipline. The main contention is that while these aims and norms may play an important role in the legitimacy of species classifications, they fail to fend off radical pluralism. It follows from this that the legitimacy of species classifications is also determined by local decisions about the aims of research and how to operationalize and balance these. This is important, I argue, because it means that any acceptable view on the legitimacy of classification should be able to account for these local decisions.

Values, regulation, and species delimitation.

Garnett and Christidis (2017) [hereafter GC] recently proposed that the International Union of the Biological Sciences should centrally regulate the taxonomy of complex organisms. Their proposal was met with much criticism (e.g. Holynski 2017; Thomson et al., 2018), and perhaps most extensively from Raposo et al. (2017) in this journal. The main target of this criticism was GC's call to, first, "restrict the freedom of taxonomic action", and, second, to let social, political and conservation values weigh in on species classification. Some commentators even went as far as to draw a comparison with the infamous Lysenko-case of state-controlled and heavily restricted science (Raposo et al. 2017, 181; Holynski 2017, 12). This comment will argue, without thereby endorsing GC's position, that these two aspects of their views need not be as threatening as this comparison suggests, and indeed are very reasonable.