Prof Marcus Munafò

Prof Marcus Munafò

University of Bristol (Bristol, United Kingdom)

 

Marcus Munafò ORCID logo is Professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Bristol, and Programme Lead within the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit. His primary research focuses on identifying causal pathways between health behaviours, and physical and mental health outcomes, using a range of epidemiological and laboratory methods. He also has a long-standing interest in how current incentive structures within science shape the behaviour of scientists, and have an impact on the quality of published work.

All OAI12 Sessions by Prof Marcus Munafò

Changing times, challenging norms: How are changes in research practice re-shaping our thinking about what research integrity should be? September 8, 2021
10:05 10:25

Moving from Trust to Trustworthiness

Academia represents a paradox. On the one hand, many of the methods and techniques used across disciplines are cutting edge and constantly evolving. However, at the same time, our underlying cultures and working practices remain rooted in the 19th Century model of the independent researcher. Research groups are effectively small, artisanal businesses, each crafting outputs – often exquisite, but the product of the unique skills and processes of that group. This model risks poor reproducibility and replicability of research – closed workflows, closed data, use of proprietary file formats, and variability in skills across researchers. It also relies on trust – we have to trust that the researcher or group has fully disclosed all aspects of the process that generated an output. There is empirical evidence that this is not the case, a situation exacerbated by current incentive structures but also legacy systems such as journal article limits on word counts and display items – an echo of the print medium that is now largely defunct. However, existing technologies allow us to make transparent many (if not all) of the elements of a research workflow – protocols, data, code and so on. This transparency of process has the potential to make the system inherently more trustworthy, by allowing it to be scrutinised, thereby moving away from a model of trust in individuals.

Slides available here: https://zenodo.org/record/5482489

12:00 13:00

Questions to a live Panel session with the speakers of today’s session