A long-term research collaboration contributed to a doctoral thesis submitted in 2019 by a junior researcher. The thesis included three unpublished manuscripts in which two senior researchers were involved.
The two senior researchers had different opinions regarding co-authorship. The disagreements concerned exclusion from the author list, the extent and nature of their actual contributions, and what position on the author list these contributions might justify. At the time of submission, the manuscripts were labelled with a note stating that the author list and order were still unresolved. The conflict prevented the manuscripts from being subsequently published.
Attempts to resolve the conflict had been conducted at the institutions of the two senior researchers since 2018 and had previously been dismissed by UiO’s two research misconduct review boards, The Common Commission on Research Integrity and The Research Ethics Committee at UiO (REC). When the two committees eventually decided to address the case in collaboration, they placed significant emphasis on the consideration of the junior researcher, who were losing an important for academic advancement early in his career. That the two parties in the case, the two senior researchers, were employed at the University of Oslo and a university hospital was the reason for the joint case proceeding.
The committees could not find documentation supporting the senior researchers' differing views of each other's contributions, and in several instances, it was one person's word against another's.
However, the committees believed there was a clear ethical duty to publish the research. They also saw a potential legal obligation to publish, according to the funding agreement with The Research Council of Norway and the final reporting requirement under the Health Research Act. Therefore, the committees proposed an author sequence based on the junior researcher's suggestion, who had a sufficient knowledge of the contributions and roles of the involved parties. This was also in line with the main rule in research ethics that the collective of authors themselves determines the order.
The committees criticized the lack of formal agreements in the research collaboration between the two institutions. Such agreements, especially concerning conflict management, could have resolved the collaboration issues earlier. The conclusion was that the actions of the two senior researchers were not considered to be scientific misconduct, not even towards each other. However, their actions, which prevented the junior researcher from publishing were in violation of research ethics and academic ideals.
Although the committees did not identify any system errors at the institutions, they recommended that an agreement should be established for any future collaboration and that the Research Integrity Ombudsman should be involved.
The committees reached a unanimous conclusion in the case.
References
- The Norwegian Research Ethics Act (2017) §§ 2 and 8
- The Health Research Act (2008) § 12
- The Norwegian National Committee for Research Ethics in Science and Technology (NENT): Guidelines for Research Ethics in Science and Technology (2015), Article 5
- The then in force general terms from The Research Council of Norway, Article 8 on the publication of project results
- International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors (“the Vancouver Recommendations”) Article 2
- All European Academies (ALLEA): European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (2019), Article 2.6 The Montreal Statement on Research Integrity in Cross-Boundary Research, Article 18
- The World Medical Association: The Declaration of Helsinki (2013), Article 36
- Simonsen and Nylenna: “Helseforskningsrett” (2005), page 258
The text has been translated and improved by UiO GPT.
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