Building trust in science: Facilitative rather than restrictive mechanisms

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has confronted society with a range of issues, dilemmas and challenges. One topic that has attracted considerable attention has been trust in science. Whilst a majority of people have shown great faith in scientific work and have applauded the arrival of a vaccine that has been realized through scientific endeavor, a significant minority has also challenged the opinions of scientists and the reliability of their research findings. This minority argues that scientists and their science is flawed, that it is biased and unsound, and captured by commercial and other interests. This minority has resisted the introduction of governmental measures based on scientific data and in doing so have challenged the legitimacy of government. The research that we publish in this journal has not stirred this level societal debate. But, at the same time, the question of trust in academic work is also playing an increasing role in our field. The erosion of trust in social science is more related to a series of high profile cases of academic fraud, often driven by a desire of ambitious individuals to perform well in an academic world that is increasingly focused on measurable metrics, such as the H-index (for some interesting analyses see: Budd, 2013; Butler et al., 2017). In some countries, there are even direct financial incentives connected to the publication of articles in highly ranked journals, and this in turn may encourage some scholars into bad scientific practices. In view of the need to maintain trust in science, a variety of measures have been proposed and are being implemented. More emphasis is being placed on ‘research integrity’ and some journals demand that research has been reviewed by an ethical board. There is a call for more ‘research transparency’ which translates into an obligation to make original datasets openly available so that others can check the reliability of the research processes and findings presented in an article. There is also an emphasis on providing transparency about the funding of research and whether those funding research may have shaped research outcomes. Increasingly, a number of journals are putting mechanisms in place to check whether co-authors have been actively involved in the generation of a manuscript and what that role has been. The range of formal measures being introduced by journals are understandable but they bring with them certain risks. The biggest risk is that the very measures that are intended to generate enhanced trust in academic work will actually perversely undermine this trust. The dynamic around trust has been analyzed comprehensively by Michael Power in his book exploring the ‘Audit Society’ (1997). Here, he argues that an increased emphasis on bureaucratic mechanisms to create trust can backfire since they are based on a starting point of mistrust. For the academic world, this could mean that the increased emphasis on openness and transparency will actually result in a climate where there is little room to discuss how science really works and how researchers deal with the difficulties that they encounter in their work. The formal reporting of scientific outcomes will be increasingly ‘decoupled’, as Power calls it, from actual practice.