Search

There has been a surge of interest for research integrity over the last decade, and there is now a range of empirical studies that document the prevalence of serious misconduct as well as questionable research practices (Fanelli 2009, Gopalakrishna et al. 2021). While these studies typically cover research design, data collection and publication practices, funding and grant-reviewing practices have remained largely neglected. This is unfortunate, as these constitute an important part of researchers' activities and involve a large part of the academic community both in the role of reviewers and applicants. In addition, there is some tentative evidence that both applicants and reviewers do not always act in line with commonly accepted codes of conduct ( Anderson et al. 2007; Bouter et al. 2016; see also Conix, De Block, and Vaesen 2021). We plan to conduct an online survey to assess the prevalence of unethical practices related to research funding and some of their drivers. Our target population are applicants, reviewers and panelists, preferably contacted through funders with the double aim of 1) contacting the right people through a relevant organisation and 2) collecting anonymous responses. Before running the main study, we will run a pilot. This is the registration for the pilot.

Taxonomy is a foundational scientific discipline, shaping not only the work of biologists and ecologists, but also how people see and understand the living world around us. In its most basic form, taxonomy is the science of precise categorization of the diversity of life on Earth into a rigorous system of scientific names and taxonomic concepts that allows for common understanding of the full extent and relationships of this diversity. Like many other scientific disciplines, taxonomy has evolved, developing over the centuries an agreed set of rules, norms, and shared strategies for definition, classification, and nomenclature of the life forms on Earth — what governance scholars would refer to as the “institution of taxonomy.” There are long-established and widely accepted governance systems in place for some aspects of taxonomy, for example the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which establishes rules for the establishment and use of scientific names for organisms known as “animals”. Other aspects of taxonomy, including the development and aggregation of species lists, currently lack similar governance institutions. Since the initial development of Linnaean taxonomy, a diversity of approaches have been adopted for critical taxonomic decisions about synonymy and classification, introducing pluralism to taxonomic principles at different levels and resulting in disagreements about species hypotheses and development of species lists. While the basic principles of Linnaean taxonomy—that species are the fundamental units of taxonomy, binomial names of species, the international codes for naming of species—have wide agreement and adherence, there is variation in implementation of the process of taxonomy, such as from application of different species concepts that result in differences in hypothesized species boundaries and potentially overlapping or conflicting species definitions. When developing species lists, these differences can result in inconsistencies from one list to another depending on the preferences of the list developer. For users of species lists, these differences can cause confusion and uncertainty, with potential effects on issues ranging from conservation to medicine (Thomson et al. this issue). Recent debates within the discipline have pointed to the potential benefits of a unified governance system for the development of taxonomic lists across all taxonomic communities leading to a single, accepted list of all life on Earth. To address this challenge, a group of taxonomists, philosophers of science, and governance scholars have established the Working Group on the Governance of Taxonomic Lists under the auspices of the International Union of Biological Sciences to investigate the development of a governance system for the aggregation of a single list of all life on Earth. As a part of this work, the Working Group is conducting a survey of taxonomists, scientists who utilize taxonomy in their work or research, and other users of taxonomic information to determine 1) if there is agreement that a single list is needed, 2) what form such a list should take, and 3) what governance mechanisms are most acceptable to taxonomists and users of taxonomic information. The results of the survey will be published in peer reviewed journals and used to inform the work of the Working Group going forward.

It is commonly assumed that taxonomists differ in how they justify ranking decisions in taxonomy. We analyze the discussion forum of the Working Group on Avian Checklists of the International Ornithological Union to understand what reasons taxonomists use to justify ranking decisions, how these differ between taxonomists, and how this affects the tendency to lump or split.

We plan to conduct an online survey to assess the prevalence of unethical practices related to research funding and some of their drivers. Our target population are applicants, reviewers and panelists, preferably contacted through funders with the double aim of 1) contacting the right people through a relevant organisation and 2) collecting anonymous responses.

A vignette study to explore whether, and for what reasons, taxonomists disagree about ranking decisions.

It is often claimed that research in humanities disciplines too often focuses on obscure topics that have little or no societal impact. Using altmetrics and peer review, we test whether this is the case for 5 different humanities disciplines (philosophy, history, literature, linguistics, and Religion). In addition, we compare the societal relevance of these disciplines. The peer review part of the study uses multiple raters from the various disciplines under consideration to evaluate and rank the societal relevance of paper and book abstracts. The bibliometric study of these same documents relies on the PlumX categories ‘social media’, ‘mentions’, ‘citations’ and ‘captures’.

ispartof: Karakter: Tijdschrift van Wetenschap issue:70 pages:9-11 status: published

Garnett and Christidis (2017) [hereafter GC] recently proposed that the International Union of the Biological Sciences should centrally regulate the taxonomy of complex organisms. Their proposal was met with much criticism (e.g. Hołyński 2017; Thomson et al., 2018), and perhaps most extensively from Raposo et al. (2017) in this journal. The main target of this criticism was GC's call to, first, "restrict the freedom of taxonomic action", and, second, to let social, political and conservation values weigh in on species classification. Some commentators even went as far as to draw a comparison with the infamous Lysenko-case of state-controlled and heavily restricted science (Raposo et al. 2017, 181; Hołyński 2017, 12). This comment will argue, without thereby endorsing GC's position, that these two aspects of their views need not be as threatening as this comparison suggests, and indeed are very reasonable. ispartof: ZOOTAXA vol:4415 issue:2 pages:390-392 ispartof: location:New Zealand status: published

Moderate pluralism is a popular position in contemporary philosophy of biology. Despite its popularity, various authors have argued that it tends to slide off into a radical form of pluralism that is both normatively and descriptively unacceptable. This paper looks at the case of biological species classification, and evaluates a popular way of avoiding radical pluralism by relying on the shared aims and norms of a discipline. The main contention is that while these aims and norms may play an important role in the legitimacy of species classifications, they fail to fend off radical pluralism. It follows from this that the legitimacy of species classifications is also determined by local decisions about the aims of research and how to operationalize and balance these. This is important, I argue, because it means that any acceptable view on the legitimacy of classification should be able to account for these local decisions.

There is growing agreement among taxonomists that species are independently evolving lineages. The central notion of this conception, evolutionary independence, is commonly operationalized by taxonomists in multiple, diverging ways. This leads to a problem of operationalization-dependency in species classification, as species delimitation is not only dependent on the properties of the investigated groups, but also on how taxonomists choose to operationalize evolutionary independence. The question then is how the operationalization-dependency of species delimitation is compatible with its objectivity and reliability. In response to this problem, various taxonomists have proposed to integrate multiple operationalizations of evolutionary independence for delimiting species. This paper first distinguishes between a standard and a sophisticated integrative approach to taxonomy, and argues that it is unclear how either of these can support the reliability and objectivity of species delimitation. It then draws a parallel between the measurement of physical quantities and species delimitation to argue that species delimitation can be considered objective and reliable if we understand the sophisticated integrative approach as assessing the coherence between the idealized models of multiple operationalizations of evolutionary independence.