WS6 - When Noncompliance and Research Misconduct Worlds Collide: Navigating Cross-Committee Compliance Issues

Workshop Materials (slides/handouts) can be found here.

Guided by three different sets of research regulations, the co-occurrence of research misconduct (e.g., fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism), noncompliance in human subjects research, and noncompliance in nonhuman animal models research poses a complicated process of review and compliance for institutions and researchers. When investigators are active in both human and nonhuman animal research, with the potential for misconduct and/or noncompliance to span across their work, the challenges of oversight are complex. Yet, by the very nature of misconduct and deviations in human and nonhuman animal research, these overlapping problems are not uncommon. Building from a PRIMR23 plenary, this workshop will provide practical guidance on the processes for and unique challenges of collaboration between research integrity/misconduct offices, HRPPs/IRBs, and IACUCs to identify, manage, and resolve allegations of co-occurring research misconduct and noncompliance. In particular, the workshop will lead audience members through the examination and investigation of a case examples in which cross-committee compliance issues have occurred, by simulating a mock committee review with the speakers (and the audience via live polling) serving as representatives from each committee. By walking through the management of the case step by step, the workshop will provide action items and standard operating procedures that attendees can take home and implement based on their unique research oversight roles (e.g., successful approaches to cross committee education and checklists to help each committee understand their reporting obligations to the others). The audience will learn how parallel investigations occur between the committees during the course of an investigation, with special attention paid to the expectations and limitations of privacy and cross-committee reporting. Moreover, the audience will understand how they can be prepared to handle these complex and challenging cross-committee compliance problems before they arise!