In most recent blog post[i] about new paradigms in Research Integrity Anna Armond and Orsolya Varga presented the emerging new topics such as research integrity (RI) in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) and implementation of Hong Kong principles. Hong Kong principles were developed in 2019 “as part of the 6^th World Conference on Research Integrity with a specific focus on the need to drive research improvement through ensuring that researchers are explicitly recognized and rewarded for behaviours that strengthen research integrity.”[ii] In this post we present the Hong Kong principles with the emphasis on the practice of open science.

Hong Kong principles were formulated as a tool to support and advance rigorous and transparent practices and ensure that trust in science would not be affected by questionable research practice – QRP (e.g., selective reporting, P-hacking, and hypothesising-after the-results-are-known or HARK-ing.)[iii]. The five Hong Kong principles are as follows: responsible research practices; transparent reporting; open science (open research); valuing a diversity of types of research; and recognizing all contributions to research and scholarly activity.[iv]. Responsible research practices entail formulation of ideas, study design, methodology, execution and dissemination. Transparent reporting emphasizes that all result should be reported, even if the results are negative. Rewarding the practice of open science is aimed at encouraging open access to data, methods and publications. This raises some questions we will discuss further. Acknowledging a broad range of activities means: “creating new ideas; testing them; replicating key findings; synthesis of existing research; developing and validating new tools, measures, or methods; etc.”[v] Last but not least recognizing essential other tasks entails valuing peer reviews for grants and publication, mentoring and outreach.

During the last decade the emerging discussions about open science marked an attempt to transition to more transparent, accessible and trustworthy way of conducting and disseminating scientific research. According to Bartling and Friesike, Open science is an umbrella term which encompasses a vast amount of different assumptions with regard to what a creation and dissemination of knowledge should be. Open science sometimes is used interchangeably with Science 2.0, Digital Humanities, eScience, Mode2, or Open Research[vi].  Open science entails a lot of things, such as: open access, open data, open reproducible research, open science evaluation, open science policies and open science tools[vii]  According to European Commission, open science (OS)  aims to promote transparency and reproducibility of results and increase and widen the diffusion of knowledge.[viii] European Commission created an Open Science cloud (EOSC) for researchers in order to ensure trust and safeguard the public interest.[ix] It encourages scientist to share, find and re-use data following FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) principles[x] . One of the 8 ambitions of European Open Science policy is indicated as adhering to standards of Research Integrity (RI).

There are five different school of open science distinguished in the literature: infrastructural (emphasizing creation of platforms, tool and services), pragmatic (focusing on more effective knowledge creation), public (with the focus on accessibility of science to all), democratic (highlighting the need of making science freely available for everyone) and measurement (aiming at the development of alternative metric system for scientific impact)[xi]. All these schools represent different angles of open science starting form a democratic right to access scientific information (e.g., Open Access publications), better communication and collaboration between science and society (e.g., citizen science) and ending with creation of collaboration and data sharing platforms.

A question might be asked whether there is a conceptual alignment between RI ethical principles and open science[xii]. According to Laine, various Codes of conduct (CoC) fostering research integrity exist in the EU and simultaneously various initiatives supporting open science are emerging. Therefore, a question can be raised whether these concepts overlap. In her research she found that the evaluated CoCs did not contradict the principles of open science, but only European code of conduct (ALLEA)[xiii] actively supported open science[xiv]. The main characteristic of the open science is that scientist can share results, data and ideas with wide audience and through the internet and it could be asked if this onlinneness will set optimal incentives for the creation of knowledge?[xv] Probably one of the task would be to set reliable safeguards that open information could not be used for malign purposes, e.g. terrorist creating bioweapons or attacking important data basis. The question about security and safety is related to sharing confidential or sensitive information and requires to develop methods for protecting scientific information systems.

If the open science policy and RI are closely related, the question is how these two approaches can strengthen each other and what are the challenges they face. Probably the biggest new challenges were created by technologies, allowing to find and upload data, share results and publish articles online, which can (or cannot, if they are behind the paywall) be accessed openly. This technological turn sometimes is even called the fourth industrial revolution[xvi] Recently emerging initiatives on fostering research integrity and promoting open science policies are a response the fourth industrial revolution and these initiatives already start offering new guidelines how to navigate to more trustworthy science.

[i] Armond, A., Varga, O. New paradigms on Research Integrity. H2020 INTEGRITY

[ii] Moher D, Bouter L, Kleinert S, Glasziou P, Sham MH, Barbour V, Coriat AM, Foeger N, Dirnagl U. The Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers: Fostering research integrity. PLoS Biol. 2020 Jul 16;18(7):e3000737. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000737. PMID: 32673304; PMCID: PMC7365391.

[iii] Bouter, L. What Research Institutions Can Do to Foster Research Integrity. Sci Eng Ethics 26, 2363–2369 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00178-5

[iv] https://www.wcrif.org/guidance/hong-kong-principles

[v] Moher D, Bouter L, Kleinert S, Glasziou P, Sham MH, Barbour V, Coriat AM, Foeger N, Dirnagl U. The Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers: Fostering research integrity. PLoS Biol. 2020 Jul 16;18(7):e3000737. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000737. PMID: 32673304; PMCID: PMC7365391. (P-7).

[vi] S. Bartling and S. Friesike. Towards Another Scientific Revolution. in  S. Bartling and S. Friesike (eds.), Opening Science, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_1, The Author(s) 2014

[vii] https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/resources

[viii] https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/policy_briefing_swafs-30-2020.pdf

[ix] https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/strategy/strategy-2020-2024/our-digital-future/open-science/european-open-science-cloud-eosc_en

[x] Wilkinson, M., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I. et al. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci Data 3, 160018 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18

[xi] S. Bartling and S. Friesike. Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought in  S. Bartling and S. Friesike (eds.), Opening Science, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_1, The Author(s) 2014

[xii] Laine, H. (2018). Open science and codes of conduct on research integrity. Informaatiotutkimus, 37(4). https://doi.org/10.23978/inf.77414

[xiii] https://allea.org/code-of-conduct/

[xiv] Laine, H. (2018). Open science and codes of conduct on research integrity. Informaatiotutkimus, 37(4). https://doi.org/10.23978/inf.77414 (p. 68).

[xv] S. Bartling and S. Friesike. Towards Another Scientific Revolution. in S. Bartling and S. Friesike (eds.), Opening Science, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_1, The Author(s) 2014

[xv] https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/resources

[xvi] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/fourth-industrial-revolution

Feature image author – @freepik/p>