The program included plenary sessions, expert discussions and workshops related to investigations of the breaches of research integrity and research misconduct in different countries, and the practice of preventing such situations in order to increase confidence in the reliability of scientific results obtained.
One of the track sessions specifically focused on funding agencies’ practices and prospectives featured speakers from the Russian Science Foundation, German Research Foundation (DFG), National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) and Administrative Department of Science, Technology and Innovation of Colombia (Colciencias).
Sergey Konovalov told session participants about the successful experience in monitoring the implementation of programs and projects, including regular and ad-hoc audits of compliance with the terms of the grants, the examination of funded projects at all stages of their implementation, efforts to minimize misconduct related to the grant agreements. The RSF speaker outlined the most typical problems and revealed ethical violations, and highlighted the transparency of grant-related procedures and open communication with the RSF community of reviewers and grant holders in the form of webinars.
“Our programs cover only about 10% of researchers and 15% of organizations carrying out research in the Russian Federation. Therefore, we can not assess the current state of research ethics and integrity in the whole country. For our part, we cooperate closely with other research funding organizations in Russia to prevent duplicated funding and ensure the responsible research practices, we do our best to lead and consistently improve our work in this crucial area, taking into account the best international principles and practices that are the subject of comprehensive discussions at this conference. After all, the credibility and trustworthiness of the results of research that we fund, depends on this work”, the representative of the Russian Science Foundation said.
