A decade since Brian Nosek launched an initiative to tackle academic fraud, efforts to impose greater accountability in research have in the past few weeks claimed two of their most high-profile scalps.
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a distinguished neuroscientist and president of Stanford, resigned and pledged to retract a series of papers in prestigious journals after an independent inquiry concluded they used manipulated data. Harvard has similarly demanded retractions of papers co-written by professor Francesca Gino, a leading dishonesty expert in its business school who is currently on administrative leave.
“There is a culture of greater transparency,” said Nosek, a professor at the University of Virginia and co-founder of the Center for Open Science. “The observation of fraud is certainly increasing, but we don’t know the denominator.”