Research misconduct in the fields of ethics and philosophy: researchers’ perceptions in Spain

This is the Author’s Original Manuscript (AOM) (also called a “preprint”) sent to review to Science and Engineering Ethics on 11/10/2020. The final version of the article was published online at SEE on 21/01/2021. The online version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00278-wEmpirical studies have revealed a disturbing prevalence of research misconduct in a wide variety of disciplines, although not, to date, in the areas of ethics and philosophy. This study aims to provide empirical evidence on perceptions of how serious a problem research misconduct is in these two disciplines in Spain, particularly regarding the effects that the model used to evaluate academics’ research performance may have on their ethical behaviour. The methodological triangulation applied in the study combines a questionnaire, a debate at the annual meeting of scientific association, and in-depth interviews. Of the 541 questionnaires sent out, 201 responses were obtained (37.1% of the total sample), with a significant difference in the participation of researchers in philosophy (30.5%) and in ethics (52.8%); 26 researchers took part in the debate and 14 interviews were conducted. The questionnaire results reveal that 91.5% of the respondents considered research misconduct to be on the rise; 63.2% considered at least three of the fraudulent practices referred to in the study to be commonplace, and 84.1% identified two or more such practices. The researchers perceived a high prevalence of duplicate publication (66.5%) and self-plagiarism (59.0%), use of personal influence (57.5%) and citation manipulation (44.0%), in contrast to a low perceived incidence of data falsification or fabrication (10.0%). The debate and the interviews corroborated these data. Researchers associated the spread of these misconducts with the research evaluation model applied in Spain

Vertrouw me, ik ben een wetenschapper. Wetenschappelijke integriteit en wangedrag binnen het biomedisch onderzoek

The issues of research integrity and misconduct feature regularly in academic journals and the press. Misconduct within biomedical research is harmful because it threatens the excellence and progression of biomedical research. It can lead for example to wrong medication and damages trust, both the public's trust in biomedical research and the mutual trust of biomedical researchers. Biomedical research is increasingly interdisciplinary and international. Therefore a breach in trust has a huge impact. Throughout this PhD thesis, we focused on three research objectives: * What is the situation concerning the research integrity guidance documents of the countries of the European Union (EU) and European Free Trade Association (EFTA)? * What is the empirical situation concerning research integrity and misconduct within biomedical research in Belgium, both within universities and industry? * What are the concluding ethical implications concerning the elaboration of aresearch integrity policy? We opted for an empirical ethics approach. Therefore, the project consists of three phases. In the first phase, a review is made of the official guidance documents on research integrity to map the different policies and strategies towards research integrity guidance within the European economic area. Secondly, both a qualitative and a quantitative study are conducted among biomedical researchers and research managers active within academia and industry. These empirical studies aimed to gauge their perspectives, knowledge and attitudes towards the issues of research integrity and misconduct. Finally, we brought the two previous phases together in a reflection about the concluding ethical implications concerning the elaboration of a research integrity policy. Our research provided several novel findings. There was heterogeneity between the research integrity guidance documents in Europe concerning various elements, including how research misconduct ought to be defined. Within Europe, various systems were implemented. In northern Europe, it was common to have a national commission to deal with research misconduct allegations. Whereas in southern Europe, no such national commissions existed. In addition, it was often challenging to access the research integrity guidance documents. Research misconduct occurred to a substantial degree in both universities and industry. Industry and universities upheld different strategies towards research integrity and misconduct. Our analysis revealed several relations with various factors concerning issues of research integrity and misconduct, and the abstract concept of "research integrity" gained a realistic, empirically-based meaning. The ethical evaluation towards research misconduct differed between biomedical research and research managers on the one hand, and research integrity guidance documents in the other hand. The reported frequency of research misconduct related with research integrity training and the ethical evaluation of the listed items of research misconduct. Based on our research findings, we formulated several recommendations in order to stimulate an agreed upon research integrity policy. We aim to achieve an agreed upon research integrity policy by creating and maintaining a continuous and cyclic interaction between empirical data and research integrity guidance documents. When evaluating a research integrity policy, the perspectives and challenges of biomedical researchers and research managers need to be taken into consideration, within the framework of foundational research integrity principles.status: publishe

On the transferability of reserves in lifelong health insurance contracts

For lifelong health insurance covers, medical inflation not sufficiently incorpo- rated in the level premiums determined at policy issue requires an appropriate increase of these premiums and/or of the corresponding reserves during the term of the contract. This premium and/or reserve update is necessary to maintain the actuarial equivalence between future health benefits and withdrawal payments on the one hand, and available reserves and future premiums on the other hand. In Vercruysse et al. (2013), premium and reserve indexing mechanisms were proposed in a discrete-time framework where medical inflation is only taken into account ex- post as it emerges over time and where the reserves are not transferable in case of policy cancellation. In this paper, we extend this work by investigating the more general situation where a surrender value is paid out in case of policy cancellation. Reserve-based as well as premium-based surrender values are considered