2021-06-28

What losses could be caused by unethical actions of the researcher?

The Office conducted the study “Monetary Value of Violations of Research and Publishing Ethics: Losses caused by the Researcher”, whereby it was endeavoured at expanding the knowledge about the value of the violations of research and publication ethics (RPE), i.e., the value of RPE violations in money according to the losses caused by the researcher.

The study results revealed that according to the author’s input in the project the researchers, the monetary value of all the publications of all the researchers within the projects funded under Research Groups Projects (RGP) varied from 0,8 thousand to 60,3 thousand euro. The average monetary value according to the author’s input as the project managers (senior scientists) in the project of all the RGP publications amounted to 21,1 thousand euro, while that as the project managers (mid-career scientists) – to 20,4 thousand euro. Meanwhile, the average monetary value according to the author’s input as the junior researchers and scientists in the project of all the RGP publications was 4 times smaller, 5,4 thousand euro and 6,0 thousand euro, respectively. This difference could have been caused by the practices of research activities and research spread in certain field / area of research and different level of the researchers’ competence that could be affected by the hourly pay rate. However, such a big difference was not noticed when the part of the RGP publications of the aforementioned researchers was analysed: the part of the RGP publications of the project managers (senior scientists and mid-career scientists) amounted to 62 percent (89 out of 144 of all the RGP publications), while the part of the RGP publications of the junior researchers and scientists (not project managers) amounted to 51 percent (73 out of 144 of all the RGP publications).

Furthermore, the study revealed that the part of the RGP publications of 98 percent of the researchers is higher than their portion of the pay in the project. Thus, the question should be raised whether the disproportion between the portion of the RGP publications and wages of the researchers does not increase the risk of RPE violations.