Harvard University may have more freedom to decide how to handle research misconduct cases under new federal rules designed to make them easier to file and resolve.
The changes, announced by the Office of Research Integrity on September 12, are intended to ease the burden on the office to handle cases and make it easier for whistleblowers to come forward. The changes come after the office received more than 200 comments last year about the proposed changes, which were criticized as being too strict.
The new guidelines come after a series of allegations of research misconduct against several prominent researchers at Boston-area hospitals and are the first policy change since 2005.
Earlier this year, four senior executives at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a top neuroscientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital were accused of falsifying data in papers.
The research misconduct allegations have also hit Harvard officials. In early September, a federal judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed against the university by Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino. Gino was accused of data manipulation in 2021 and her tenure was up for review in July.
“We appreciate this collaborative approach and believe it has resulted in a final rule that is better for administrators as well as for our research and academic mission,” Christine Bittinger, HMS dean for faculty and research integrity, said in an emailed statement to The Crimson.
“These changes include significant extensions to previously unrealistic timelines, statutes of limitations and production of organizational records,” Bittinger wrote.
In addition to relaxing case timelines, the changes would also remove a proposed rule requiring all interviews during the investigation and evaluation phase to be transcribed, allowing “honest errors” to be caught at any stage of the process and allowing investigators to close these cases earlier in the investigative process rather than escalating them into an investigation.
HMS’s research integrity policy will be updated in light of the changes, but “the overall effect will be administrative rather than substantive with respect to oversight of integrity matters,” Bittinger wrote.
“We don’t know whether the revised rules will have a significant impact on whistleblower experiences,” she added.
Holden H. Thorpe, editor-in-chief of Science, a prestigious journal that publishes papers by prominent Boston-area researchers, pointed out the limitations of the new rules in an interview with The Crimson.
“In some cases it has allowed institutions to be more transparent about their activities,” Thorpe said, but “it doesn’t go far enough to say that institutions have a duty to tell the public if they have concerns about a paper.”
Thorpe pointed to a small change in language: The original proposed rule said research journals must be notified about certain aspects of a study, but the revised rule says journals “may” be notified.
“I would be very pleasantly surprised if any agency interpreted the word ‘may’ to mean that they should be more responsive to us,” Thorpe said.
“In my opinion, they prioritized the agency’s fear of bad publicity and litigation over their obligation to negotiate directly with taxpayers and other scientists,” Thorpe added.
—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her at X @VeronicaHPaulus.
—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at akshaya.ravi@thecrimson.com. Follow her at X @akshayaravi22.
