We invite you to consider if we, as a community of scholars and practitioners, need a Research Ethics Committee that will oversee the integrity of our work and, if necessary, investigate cases where there is suspected violation of an ethical code, e.g. plagiarism, data fabrication, etc. In other communities (notably medicine, law, accountancy, engineering, dentistry, etc.) such ethical codes come as part and parcel of membership of the community - and membership is generally mandatory if you wish to practice. Violation of a code might therefore lead to consequences such as public warnings and reprimands or even expulsion (in extreme cases) from the society/community, with the consequent loss of right to practice. In IS, it is different, as there is (currently) no legal obligation to be a member of a society such as the AIS - in order to practice as a teacher, researcher, consultant or other practitioner. The sanctions that an Ethics Research Committee could impose (the sharpness of its teeth if you like) would need to be very carefully considered, almost certainly in conjunction with the journals and conferences in which we publish.
We would like to solicit your views on this topic - do we need an IS Ethics Research Committee? Opinions will be posted to the ISWORLD Ethics webpages. In order to protect your privacy, we will treat all opinions as anonymous, unless you give us explicit permission to identify you. Identification can include one or more of: name, affiliation, country, role (student, academic, consultant, journal editor, etc.), and any other identifier you'd like to add.
I think we need an ethics committee. Over the last year or so I've seen an increasing number of cases involving copying of web pages into papers and reports without giving proper credit. My impression is that this is not considered unethical by many. For this issue alone I think a committee would be worth while. Also, as I am additionally a practicing Professional Engineer I agree with your statements that ethics is part and parcel of the profession. I agree that we should have a professional body that overseas our ethical issues as it is a common practice in most every other discipline.
One question that comes to my mind is: Is there any information available on what, if any, "unethical" activity takes place in our profession, and the rates of that misconduct? I would think that this would have some bearing on the necessity for such a committee. If we have yet to see a case of unethical conduct, perhaps our energies could be better spent elsewhere (of course, just because none has been discovered does not mean that everyone is behaving as they should). However, if there is evidence that unethical activity is taking place, then a committee could be a useful countermeasure. I like to think that my colleagues are all of the highest integrity and I would be depressed to find that I am naive.
Secondly, if a committee is to be formed, then I would think an ethical code of conduct would have developed for the committee to enforce (or perhaps the first task of the committee could be to develop such a code of conduct for presentation to the membership of AIS).
An interesting idea. I guess my first question is whether we have a problem. Has there been any research on whether there is a motivation for a code? The fact that other disciplines have a committee is of interest, but not definitive with respect to us. I know Ned had a problem, but how universal is this? If there has not been such a study, would someone in the community take this on as a first step?
I definitely and strongly vote YES. Its "teeth" can be very strong. Anyone caught violating (level of violation should be defined) is disbarred from publishing. Most of the people are in a "publish or perish" situation. Can't publish, lose all stature!
The Ethics committee definitely needs to play a more active role. It appears that Ned's experience, documented in his CACM article, is not an isolated case, though I wish it were.
Our university has an ethics committee and all researchers have to complete an ethics approval form before any research that involves human interaction can proceed with reporting mechanisms and feedback from those involved in any research project. All research carried out under the name of the university must first go through the ethics committee, even student research projects must have clearance. Our reporting mechanism requires 6 monthly reporting to the ethics committee and reviewed by the panel. At this stage no violations have occurred due to the strict adherence to the university policy and procedures.
Our university has strict research ethics guidelines that are appropriate for all research with human subjects, such as in interviewing. This could be regarded as transcending any professional codes as the sanctions available from the employer are applicable to all staff, regardless of profession. IS researchers thus face the same ethical standards as all others. In practice, all funds for funded research programs are not released until an ethics approval is obtained. Students' theses must be 'signed off' by supervisors, as having gained ethics approval. Even students going out to interview IT staff for help in their class projects are supposed to get ethics clearance (normally this is done by the lecturer). The issue of fabrication (or theft) of data is not covered by our ethics committee but could be a different disciplinary matter. Offiicially it is peer review and publication that is supposed to uncover these. The university's ethics practices are most likely very similar to all other universities in Australia because of our National Health and Medical Research Council requirements, see http://www.ro.mq.edu.au/ethics.htm All this means that an ethics code from a professional body is not going to be accepted at this university, and probably not anywhere else in Australia.
Perhaps it is a gap in our overall set of schedules, but we have to get ethics approval in advance for research activity that involves human subjects. If all we are doing is writing a program or developing an algorithm (or reviewing other papers) there would be no ethics requirement. The issue of plagiarism, fraud, theft, etc. is a disciplinary matter and occurs after the event. The Vancouver protocol is quite clear on this; they (journals) leave it up to institutions and funding bodies to deal with improprieties. Professional practice as an academic has very broad parameters, and anything naughty that is done can be a disciplinary matter.
One possible way to stir some interest in the topic would be to draft a proposed Research Ethics code for our community, and then send it out to the ISWorld list. You might be able to capitalize on the perennial ISWorld furors on research relevance by including a statement or two about obligations of researchers to make their research accessible to the widest possible relevant audiences. This accessibility would include making findings available on the Internet as much as possible, and by using writing styles that don't discourage readership outside of academia.
Ethics should be important to the IS research communitee but I'm not certain it is that necessary in my country, Canada. This is because our Canadian Universities now fall under a Tri-Council for Ethics in Research, which has brought together the standards, processes, approvals and reprimands of our national system. Our Federal Government combined the standards from Medicine, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences to which we all must adhere for any type of research (academic, student research projects, etc.). A separate IS Research Ethics Council would lack authority in this Canadian System and lack the teeth to motivate us to comply.
1. The implicit motivation, that other professions have such committees, is
weak. IS isn't a profession and, for a variety of reasons, it is unlikely to
ever achieve that kind of status. Consequently, an ethics committee is unlikely
to ever achieve the status that it does in law or dentistry. Also, we haven't
seen the dramatic motivating cases. Where is the example of the evil IS
professor or practitioner who has gone unpunished and is still practicing after
molesting his student, stealing money, or selling passwords?
Without licensing an ethics committee would be just a group of
"busy-bodies," unwelcomed to participate in a dispute by at least one
of the parties.
2. There is already a code of ethics for IS professionals, produced and
distributed by the ACM at http://acm.org.
3. If there is an ethics committee, ISWORLD shouldn't start it. It should be
started by AIS.
While in principle the idea of an ethics committee is good, I believe the IS research community is still so small that it can be self-policing. I think there are 2000-2500 members of ISWorld, which you might use a proxy for the IT community as a whole. It is still such a tiny community that everyone knows everyone else's business, to a fault. If anyone was accused and/or "convicted" of the offenses you mentioned (e.g., data fabrication), I believe the whole community would know about it in lightning speed. Research ethics processes are typical handled within one's university, and I would presume that 99% of IS researchers are employed by a college or university. This is very different than in fields like accounting, engineering, dentistry, and medicine, where university employment may be in the minority or at least not as much of a majority. Within the university structure, trials would still be conducted and penalties would still be meted. I remember Ned telling me a few years ago of an instance where his work was plagiarized by a fellow academic. Was the outcome handled to his satisfaction? At a point where we are all so busy with other "overhead" functions, it just doesn't seem like a great use of our time to create one more committee to duplicate functions that largely already exist.
While I believe that in theory a research ethic committee is a good idea, there are some practical issues to be considered first. Perhaps the main question is who would these ethics be for. Is it so that we want to watch over each other in the rat race for academic merits or is it to assure our funders of our academic morality. Maybe its both. Whatever the audience is, it affects of course directly what is included in the ethics and how they are presented and enforced. In terms of the actual procedure for ensuring ethical practice other issues become revelant. An assumption that seems to apply is that "we" are talking about some sort of anglo/american ethics. Coming to agreement on global IS research ethics would entail agreeing on the lowest common denominator or in other words formulations so blurry so as to appease everybody. The it comes to the workings of an eventuell comittee. Who is going to pay somebody to be involved in the enormous amount of work that would be needed to cover thousands of papers and multitudes of conferences in a field where there is no real agreement about its contents.
An alternative to this "stick" approach would be the "carrot" approach where researchers or even more so conferences and journals should embrace an ethical code as a sign of credibility in selling their ideas and innovations to actual and potential finansiers. Ethical should be marketed. Researchers would perhaps then see real benefits in abiding in a code of ethics.
One area where an Ethics committee might be useful is to serve as a central repository where researchers state their Research Model and their hypotheses before they collect the data. This might be critical especially when we increasingly start using SEM techniques in the analysis of data. This might also help address one of the criticism that these techniques face (that the temptation is too great for researchers to fit the model to the data; Of course, revalidation using a different sample set should help alleviate the problem, but I am not sure how many researchers do this).
I hope that this will also be more do-able than asking researchers to submit data.
Last updated April 17th, 2003.