Research Integrity

The NIH director has some useful comments this morning how to promote a culture of research integrity adding to the available body of evidence.

Institutional and government policies that might enhance integrity and excellence: Among a variety of possibilities, I talk about the promising roles of electronic laboratory notebooks and of policies to promote data sharing.

While I agree with many of this thoughts, I do not believe that the permanent mantra for excellence will increase research integrity. Even worse, if you demand extraordinary work, you will get extraordinary work irrespective of what happened in the lab.