committee work

Researchers may also be appointed to serve on various committees or boards. It is perhaps appropriate to distinguish between memberships re- lated to research councils, research foundations and the like, and those of

a more commercial nature, e.g. a position on the board of directors of a company.

Researchers serving on committees and boards within the research com- munity are subject to very similar ethical requirements to those acting as re- viewers or external assessors. They are all involved in decisions and appraisals concerning other people’s research. To maintain the research community’s confidence in these decisions and appraisals, it is particularly important that committee members make every effort to be independent of their own environments and affiliations, to avoid showing special favour to their own discipline, university or department, colleagues or students. In practice this can be very difficult, not least because they may be seen by their close col- leagues in the research community as “their subject representative” on the body concerned. A committee member may in other words be expected to speak up on behalf, say, of biology, in competition with representatives of other disciplines. There needs to be an open discussion about what mem- bership of a given committee or board entails, primarily with the electoral college which selects its members, and subsequently with other members of the body in question.

Appointments to committees of this kind are to be regarded as positions of trust. They also confer influence and power, however, which in the long term, even with the best of intentions, may corrupt those who hold them. In addition, committee responsibilities may take so much time that the member’s competence as a researcher suffers. Researchers should therefore only take on a limited number of such positions, and actively seek to pro- mote rotation of members, to allow others, and especially young researchers, to contribute fresh views. It is inappropriate, though, to entrust existing members with recruiting their own replacements, as the temptation to se- cure a continuing influence which this represents may be difficult to resist. As a member of a board or committee outside the research community, it is important to realize that, like it or not, in this context it is in fact the re- search community you are representing. You will usually have been appoin- ted because you represent a certain desired area of expertise. Consequently, here too the researcher has a special responsibility. Your membership should not result in you lending scientific legitimacy to a company’s operations or production, for example, when the scientific evidence is in fact unclear or points in the opposite direction. Your task, rather, is to communicate the results and possibilities of research, without exaggeration or concealment.

What would you do in the following situations?

You have promised to serve on a PhD examining committee in a field somewhat removed from your own. When you are preparing the evening before by reading a survey article by

a well-known international authority in the field, you happen to discover that five lines in the introduction to the thesis are identical to a passage from the article you are reading. You do not have time to talk to the candidate’s supervisor until the meeting of the exam- ining committee after the public defence of the thesis. The supervisor is surprised when you raise the matter, but says that the rest of the thesis is no doubt all right.

What do you do?

You are on the board of a research council. On the table is a proposal to set up a ma- jor computer centre that will support the work of many different research groups. An analysis has shown there to be a considerable need for the centre, and you share that assessment. But you also have in front of you another proposal that is the result of a happy coincidence: the British navy is selling an ocean-going marine survey vessel, which would provide ideal support for three world-class Swedish research groups in marine biology and oceanography. One of the groups, from Göteborg, is a lead partner in a UN- organized project on the role of ocean currents in long-term climate change. The vessel is now available at a bargain price, just a tenth the cost of a new one, and an immediate decision has to be taken. Similar offers are very rare on the ship market.

The two projects are competing for the same funds. You are a geoscientist on the re- search council board, and happen to know that the leader of the Göteborg group is con- sidering an offer of a chair in California. He has hinted that he will accept the chair and take most of the group with him to the United States if the purchase of the survey vessel does not go ahead.

How will these circumstances affect your position at the meeting?

8 ReseaRch MiscoNduct