Given the ramifications of scientific misconduct, and the importance of educational/other efforts to foster the responsible conduct of research, a university's research misconduct (RM) policy performs an important communication function. Such policies are at least implicitly educative, and should provide guidance to the people they cover. Because RM policies are potentially important information sources we should evaluate how well they provide an appropriate range of information. This research will determine the accessibility and usefulness of university RM policies. The objectives are to (1) Evaluate RM policies at major research institutions, (2) Determine university research integrity officers' satisfaction with and plans to revise their RM policies, and (3) Describe changes in major U. S. universities' RM policies following the newly-revised PHS policies on research misconduct. The short-term goals of this research are to: (a) assess how accessible Rl policies are and determine how readily-available they are to the people bound by them; (b) conduct a content analysis of Rl policies and determine who well they cover the appropriate content; (c) survey research integrity officers to gauge their evaluations of and satisfaction with their RM policies, identify desired policy changes, and list challenges faced when trying to revise the Rl policies; (d) compare research integrity officers' policy evaluations to the strengths and weaknesses of universities' RM policies; (e) monitor RM policies, to identify when they are updated in the wake of the revised PHS RM policies; and (f) using RM policies collected in Fall 2004 as a baseline, identify how and to what extent RM policies have been revised following the new PHS RM policies, and determine the effectiveness of the revised RM policies. These short-term goals serve the broad, long-term objective of this research: to contribute to the development of resources designed to promote the responsible conduct of research, by evaluating the state-of-the-art of RM policies at major universities and highlighting areas of strength and weakness. ? ? ?
