Uploaded July 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
About this event
To be trustworthy and rigorous, science must be correctable. If scientific claims are not adequately validated or confirmed, time and money are misspent, true or chance findings are difficult to separate, and public trust in expertise is eroded. However, the ability to correct the scientific record is not always possible because the act of correction is pitted against inappropriate cultural norms or vested interests.
Science is an activity that is dependent on economic demands. In academia, there is a highly competitive job market, with scarce opportunities for research funding. Hiring and promotion criteria rely on publication and grant-funding track records, which means verifying evidence can come second to the next publishable and lucrative ‘groundbreaking’ research. Inevitably, criticism can make career prospects even more precarious, with significant costs to those who attempt to criticise and - in particular - whistleblow.
However, is the status quo fixed? Is the environment in fact conducive to rigorous science? Is there no room for improvement? To explore these and many more questions, an esteemed panel has been brought together to discuss the issues at the heart of why we struggle to correct bad science.
In what promises to be an exciting joint conversation from different perspectives of the research lifecycle and career stage, our panelists will discuss the barriers to correcting bad science and the costs borne by those who have tried to. The aim is to raise awareness and to instigate a discussion on how to substantiate the ability to correct science when necessary.
In affiliation with ReproducibiliTea, RIOT Science Club, and The Crick Institute, it gives us great pleasure in inviting you to The Cost of Correcting Bad Science!
About our speakers
Deigo Baptista
Based at the Wellcome Trust, Diego works across policy, advocacy, diversity and inclusion, and is was part of the Open Research Team. Diego will kick us off with a presentation on great work The Wellcome Trust is doing to build a better research culture
Patricia Herterich
Patricia has worked as a data librarian at CERN’s Scientific Information Service, and has contributed to the Turing Way handbook, and is a Open Life Science programme mentor. Her talk will introduce the Hidden REF, a competition that recognises all research outputs and every role that makes research possible.
Tanita Casci
Tanita is the Head of Research Policy at the University of Glasgow, where she develops institutional policies and projects that promote a positive research culture. The focus of her talk seeks to highlight that research integrity relies on sustained improvements to research culture.
Stephen Eglen
A Reader in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, Stephen is also a member of the Bullied into Bad Science campaign, an associate editor for BiorXiv and senior editor at the journal Scientific Data. In line with his long-standing advocacy for Open Science, Stephen will outline better research practices to cull the publish or perish culture that so often leads to bad science
Elisabeth Bik
And finally, we have Elisabeth Bik. A former member of David Relman’s lab in the School of Medicine at Stanford, Bik is now a science integrity volunteer and occasional consultant. In her talk she will present her work and show several types of inappropriately duplicated images, which includes her tireless efforts to scan 20,000 papers in 40 journals to identify inappropriately duplicated images.
All slides are uploaded to our OSF page (osf.io/3nqg5/)
About this event
To be trustworthy and rigorous, science must be correctable. If scientific claims are not adequately validated or confirmed, time and money are misspent, true or chance findings are difficult to separate, and public trust in expertise is eroded. However, the ability to correct the scientific record is not always possible because the act of correction is pitted against inappropriate cultural norms or vested interests.
Science is an activity that is dependent on economic demands. In academia, there is a highly competitive job market, with scarce opportunities for research funding. Hiring and promotion criteria rely on publication and grant-funding track records, which means verifying evidence can come second to the next publishable and lucrative ‘groundbreaking’ research. Inevitably, criticism can make career prospects even more precarious, with significant costs to those who attempt to criticise and - in particular - whistleblow.
However, is the status quo fixed? Is the environment in fact conducive to rigorous science? Is there no room for improvement? To explore these and many more questions, an esteemed panel has been brought together to discuss the issues at the heart of why we struggle to correct bad science.
In what promises to be an exciting joint conversation from different perspectives of the research lifecycle and career stage, our panelists will discuss the barriers to correcting bad science and the costs borne by those who have tried to. The aim is to raise awareness and to instigate a discussion on how to substantiate the ability to correct science when necessary.
In affiliation with ReproducibiliTea, RIOT Science Club, and The Crick Institute, it gives us great pleasure in inviting you to The Cost of Correcting Bad Science!
About our speakers
Deigo Baptista
Based at the Wellcome Trust, Diego works across policy, advocacy, diversity and inclusion, and is was part of the Open Research Team. Diego will kick us off with a presentation on great work The Wellcome Trust is doing to build a better research culture
Patricia Herterich
Patricia has worked as a data librarian at CERN’s Scientific Information Service, and has contributed to the Turing Way handbook, and is a Open Life Science programme mentor. Her talk will introduce the Hidden REF, a competition that recognises all research outputs and every role that makes research possible.
Tanita Casci
Tanita is the Head of Research Policy at the University of Glasgow, where she develops institutional policies and projects that promote a positive research culture. The focus of her talk seeks to highlight that research integrity relies on sustained improvements to research culture.
Stephen Eglen
A Reader in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, Stephen is also a member of the Bullied into Bad Science campaign, an associate editor for BiorXiv and senior editor at the journal Scientific Data. In line with his long-standing advocacy for Open Science, Stephen will outline better research practices to cull the publish or perish culture that so often leads to bad science
Elisabeth Bik
And finally, we have Elisabeth Bik. A former member of David Relman’s lab in the School of Medicine at Stanford, Bik is now a science integrity volunteer and occasional consultant. In her talk she will present her work and show several types of inappropriately duplicated images, which includes her tireless efforts to scan 20,000 papers in 40 journals to identify inappropriately duplicated images.
All slides are uploaded to our OSF page (osf.io/3nqg5/)
