Open Research Practices for Research Integrity
Presenter: Dr Lai Ma
Lecturer/Assistant Professor School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin and Project Lead of the Cultivating an Open Research Culture in the Humanities and Social Sciences project funded under the NORF Open Research Fund 2023.
Abstract
Research integrity is concerned with the conduct and practices of researchers, involving issues such as gift and ghost authorship, plagiarism, fabrication and falsification, paper mills, amongst others. The emergence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT has also raised questions about authenticity, copyright, and the future of scholarly publishing and knowledge production. These research integrity issues can be attributed to the so-called ‘publish or perish’ culture: there is no or little reason to purchase authorship from paper mills or to publish fraudulent research if publications are not the currency of the academic marketplace. How can open research practices address research integrity issues while highlighting the tension induced by research assessment criteria? In this lightning talk, I will discuss two areas of open research: open data/code and open peer review. First, how can open data and open code in response to the crisis of replicability and reproducibility, while addressing the challenges of with respect to cultural sensitivities and marginalised communities? Second, how can open peer review counter the emergence and prevalence of paper mills and AI generated texts and images? The pros and cons of open identities and open reports will be discussed.
About
Lai Ma is Assistant Professor at the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin, where she teaches in the Master of Library and Information Studies programme, including Scholarly Communication. Her research is concerned with infrastructure, research evaluation and the political economy of information and she has published in the Journal of Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Documentation, UKSG Insights and LIBER Quarterly. Her book, The Scholarly Communication Handbook: From Research Dissemination to Societal Impact will be available in October 2023.