Sometimes it feels like, fighting a loosing battle!

• • Being an avid researcher, I always push myself to think counterintuitively. In this case, why is research integrity important? What if there was no integrity in research? A few thousands might die because of medicines which should have saved them, 1000s more may die due to building and bridge collapses, millions may starve due to failed harvest cultivating crops which claimed overproduction, maybe we might have more fireworks in the sky when satellites are launched or we might have all been dead and gone.
    
    

    Importance of standards:

    We always give excuses for not being up to the mark. But who sets these marks? Should we actually even compromise perfection? We as a race have understood from our experiences over the centuries that efficiency is as important as perfection. So we set standards, to bring about this balance. We allow error bars and we empathize with experimental and human errors and try to accommodate them, see the significance of the outcome rather than a black and white approach.
    
    

    Rat race and instant gratification:

    “I need to report to my boss by tonight. So, I don't care about the pH being 7.6 instead of 7.5. All he needs is data which we can add in that paper.” This is just the tip of the iceberg, we know too well that the system we are in today which is based on impact factors and publish or perish culture, is the root cause. We have run too far with it as a community to even turn back and introspect. We think it is the norm, we breathe it, we believe it and we live it. We want every single experiment to be a part of a research article which will be published in a high impact factor paper. So what happens, we go a step further.
    
    

    Breaching the boundaries:

    When a meeting is set for 8 am we sometimes tend to think 10 minutes past 8 am is also ok. Our day to day approaches like this, pushes us to overrule the standards assuming time intervals in readings are ok, removing outliers are not bad and may be just decreasing the control value a bit to reach the magical p < 0.05 is acceptable. By doing this, we ignore the gravity of the effect it is going to have on the world.

    
    

    There are more than a few reasons why integrity is important;

    
    

    •   Most of the research is done using the hard earned tax money of the general public.
    •   The researchers are most of the time paid for all the work they perform, unlike the days when
      scientist worked part time at odd hours to support the research they were doing.
    •   More importantly, the basis of any project is to strive for a better human existence, if the
      research we do is not going to accomplish this due to its falseness; ARE WE DOING JUSTICE TO EVEN OUR OWN CONSCIENCE? 

Scientific openness...

We talk a lot about having an opened mind, having a transparent government, striving for an open society and the list for openness goes on. Yes, transparency and openness are not actually synonyms but they are degrees of openness itself. Something which is transparent doesn't mean that it is open to everyone and it holds good for a few scenarios, such as the government where a lot of intelligence reports and other high security information are maintained; and it is justifiable. But sometimes absolute openness is essential. 

Sometimes, human evolution doesn't go forward, one such area is knowledge sharing. One aspect we humans pride over other living creatures is the collective knowledge which we have accumulated over the past thousands of years. For example, making fire wasn't just learnt and forgotten but it was just passed on and on and even till this very day, we use the same cave man technology to create fire using abrasives. These are very different from protective instincts which is also kind of genetically driven like a mice being scared of a cat (like human beings afraid of lizards and cockroaches :P :P) but this is not knowledge.

When humans started to accumulate knowledge 1000s of years ago, they were very open, they drew/ wrote on walls and just passed the knowledge to everyone. In the times of the great scholars of the Greek and Roman Empire a lot of philosophers though scholarly, took to the general public to profess their knowledge and ideas. As centuries went by, the scholarly started to isolate themselves from the society and started to form their own class ignoring the others. This led to a certain drift and the bridge of knowledge transfer between the scholarly and a general public started to crumble. There has been a great deterioration in this process from a day where scholars were the once who were able to explain big science to common man; to this day were scholars are the ones who talk with scientific jargon which the general public could never understand.

There has also been a paradigm shift in the way scientific knowledge is treated, from the days when science was free and just pure knowledge to a day when everything in science means money and business. I read this title somewhere but it hits the bull’s eye, “Knowledge not shared is knowledge wasted”. Today, when more than 60% of the world earns less than 2USD per day, an average scientific article could cost around 10-20 USD. We are talking about knowledge explosion and all those things these days but; in reality it is knowledge implosion. We generate so much knowledge but we prohibit people from reading it and just because it is not open to everyone, the knowledge which is generated is just becoming obsolete and useless.

This cocoon which someone initiated thinking that a butterfly will eventually fly out of it one day, is strangling the same beautiful creature to death. There are some positive signs though in the recent past, leading scientist have come out in favor of openness and are pushing for greater knowledge sharing. They have created platforms of open access of scientific articles and a lot more people have started to appreciate the fact of openness. The irony in this is, we receive the money to do research from the general public in the form of taxes but totally shield them from the knowledge we generate out their hard earned money. Thus far except the warriors of open access, the larger scientific community has been silent spectator on this sad truth.