Fostering Integrity in Research, STARTS, and Art-Science Fakes

The National Academies in the USA have published a new report on Fostering Integrity in Research. Although data on the scale of the problem is missing, the report highlights new Detrimental Research Practices which are damaging to public confidence in research and its outcomes. We though, in the years we spent in Brussels, saw many examples of these Detrimental Research Practices, on both sides – researchers and the European Commission itself.

Fostering Integrity in Research is a hard call, given the obsession with fortune and glory that now dominates the research system both at institutional and individual levels. Fostering Integrity in Research becomes even harder to put into practice though, when the research funding agency itself, is not fostering integrity in its own operations, like for example in its dealings with so-called independent experts. This is why we have started to withdraw from all engagement with the European Commission. The problems are endemic and systemic. On the one side you have people who want fortune, glory and power, and on the other side you have technocrats with power and money who want glory. Of course not all are like this. But the culture of the organisation is such that it leads to these Detrimental Research Practices.

So we are back to the matter of the European Commission, DG CONNECT, STARTS, and art-science fakes! We have not finished with this matter. We will soon offer some web links by way of a STARTS unconventional and compelling product. In this case the product is a game – the aesthetics of play. We provide some web links, and you have to spot what is wrong with the material at the other end of the links. No prizes of course, just the fun of participating (the aesthetics of participation) and wondering – it is a game full of ambiguity. Nevertheless it may help you to see the world differently by encouraging you not to accept at face value what people say, especially those with vested interests and conflicts of interest, as they go about constructing the artificial reality that is STARTS – the emperor’s new clothes. Human delusions know no bounds. Now they START to have a boundary, beyond which there is pure fantasy – DG CONNECT technocratic fantasy.

Surreal! Yes indeed it is, partly – in the sense of allowing the subconscious to speak.