The estimated costs associated with a single investigation of scientific misconduct can be as high as US $525,000, and the costs of investigating the allegations of scientific misconduct annually reported in the United States to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), could exceed US$110 million, according to a paper from Arthur M. Michalek and colleagues from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, New York, USA published in this week's PLoS Medicine.
The authors devised a statistical model to estimate the costs associated with scientific misconduct — which they divided into three categories; conduct of the fraudulent research, investigation, and remediation — and then applied this model to one case study that was based on an actual investigation. The authors conservatively estimated that if their observed costing for this single investigation was applied to all 217 allegations of misconduct reported to the ORI in their last reporting year, the direct costs would exceed $110 million.
The authors argue that although scientific misconduct may never be eliminated, cases of misconduct more related to a lack of scientific standards (rather than to deliberate misdeeds) can be prevented but concede that how such prevention can be achieved has not yet been determined. They say, "Most academic institutions have… undertaken a number of efforts to increase awareness through education and training, setting forth and enforcing scientific codes of conduct, providing mentorship training, auditing and monitoring procedures, and implementing procedures for reporting and investigating alleged incidents of misconduct."
The authors conclude: "The ultimate effectiveness of these approaches may take time to discern. What is known, however, is that the costs of these proactive activities pale in comparison to the costs of a single case of scientific misconduct."
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Michalek AM, Hutson AD, Wicher CP, Trump DL (2010) The Costs and Underappreciated Consequences of Research Misconduct: A Case Study. PLoS Med 7(8): e1000318. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000318
Public Library of Science: http://www.plos.org
Thanks to Public Library of Science for this article.
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I read this to say that it costs too much to investigate fraudulent science, so go ahead and do it... am I missing the point?
Yeah, I think so, I read it as they are having to invest a lot of money to be proactive about educating researchers and trying to prevent it from happening, but it's well worth the cost since it will ultimately be less than the cost associated with instances of fraud.
How do you prevent someone from making up something on purpose to get it accepted for publication though? My understand of this article was that it wasn't cost effective to do that, and therefore we are missing on potentially made up results!
So these dudes just wrote a paper to state the existence of a problem (which we knew), that investigating this problem is expensive (which we knew), and that we have no good answer to it (which we knew). What a waste of space. You are never going to catch all the crooks and cheats. Peer review, stringent standards for publication, and others trying to reproduce the data are the best known answers to this problem.
The point of the paper was to assess the direct costs of scientific misconduct. It's actually written by some of the chief chickenheads at Roswell Park Cancer Center and provides an interesting view of how scientific misconduct cases are handled. They seem to want to make the case that there are many 'sins of omission' and little smudges made to massage data that constitute misconduct, either consciously or unconsciously, but these investigations can be just as costly as blatantly making crap up.
By the way, here's the link to the paper. It's worth a read if you're interested in how misconduct investigations are run.