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Our university system has started to implement a reporting requirement regarding potential conflicts of interest based on some reports of potentially inappropriate relationships between researchers and outside interests (e.g. companies). Our Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects Research has been tasked with keeping track of this. The discussion at IRB centered around researchers who are funded by private or outside the university entities and how the interests of those entities might conflict with the interests of the University in compliance with IRB rules, protections for human subjects, etc.

There are also reports that some journals may be requiring a statement that researchers do not have a conflict of interest when they submit their manuscripts for publications.

Does anyone else have experience with this? What are your thoughts?

Richard A. Posthuma, JD, PhD

Professor of Management

Editor, International Journal of Conflict Management

College of Business Administration

University of Texas at El Paso

El Paso, Texas 79968

(915) 747-8646

(915) 747-5348 (Fax)

rposthuma@utep.edu

Student SHRM Chapter Website: www.organizations.utep.edu/shrm 

ΙΧΘΥΣ

I have been doing some research on training graduate students in Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR), and that work has lead me to read up on many of these issues. Most of these regulations started in biomedical work and have moved into more social science research through IRBs and training requirement put forth by NIH and NSF. (If you ever submit anything to NSF, your university is now required to have a RCR training plan and requirements in place). The government's main concern has been the integrity of research about drugs because of the consequences of research misconduct on public health, but it can expand to questionable research practices in any domain where a conflict of interest could be present.

I think that Management and I/O Psychology have been relatively unconcerned with these issues because in the occasional situation where a company does fund us, their success is not affected by our published findings. Our published findings may also look substantially different that the technical reports that are provided to the organization. In fact we often remove organization identifying information from publications (i.e. A large Midwestern manufacturing organization).

The new Social and Personality Psychology journal SPPS has declarations of conflicts of interest for every article. Science and Engineering Ethics asks you to state each author's contribution the project. These declarations are meant to at least have the authors think about the RCR issues in each project including whether everyone should actual be an author on the project (which has also historically been more of an issue in medical research). I expect these types of declarations to become more common in the coming years in all areas of academic publishing.

A good review of the Office for Research Integrity's positions on the topic can be found at http://ori.dhhs.gov/documents/rcrintro.pdf

I hope that was helpful,

Brad

Bradley Brummel, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

University of Tulsa

Department of Psychology

Office: 918-631-3774

Our university system has started to implement a reporting requirement regarding potential conflicts of interest based on some reports of potentially inappropriate relationships between researchers and outside interests (e.g. companies). Our Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects Research has been tasked with keeping track of this. The discussion at IRB centered around researchers who are funded by private or outside the university entities and how the interests of those entities might conflict with the interests of the University in compliance with IRB rules, protections for human subjects, etc.

There are also reports that some journals may be requiring a statement that researchers do not have a conflict of interest when they submit their manuscripts for publications.

Does anyone else have experience with this? What are your thoughts?

Richard A. Posthuma, JD, PhD

Professor of Management

Editor, International Journal of Conflict Management

College of Business Administration

University of Texas at El Paso

El Paso, Texas 79968

(915) 747-8646

(915) 747-5348 (Fax)

rposthuma@utep.edu

Student SHRM Chapter Website: www.organizations.utep.edu/shrm 

ΙΧΘΥΣ

Dear Richard, the Journal of Management Inquiry started requiring authors to sign such a statement.

Kim Boal

Our university system has started to implement a reporting requirement regarding potential conflicts of interest based on some reports of potentially inappropriate relationships between researchers and outside interests (e.g. companies). Our Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects Research has been tasked with keeping track of this. The discussion at IRB centered around researchers who are funded by private or outside the university entities and how the interests of those entities might conflict with the interests of the University in compliance with IRB rules, protections for human subjects, etc.

There are also reports that some journals may be requiring a statement that researchers do not have a conflict of interest when they submit their manuscripts for publications.

Does anyone else have experience with this? What are your thoughts?

Richard A. Posthuma, JD, PhD

Professor of Management

Editor, International Journal of Conflict Management

College of Business Administration

University of Texas at El Paso

El Paso, Texas 79968

(915) 747-8646

(915) 747-5348 (Fax)

rposthuma@utep.edu

Student SHRM Chapter Website: www.organizations.utep.edu/shrm 

ΙΧΘΥΣ