Ibn Al-Haytham

Interesting point of view. So you say that as long as you are not a senior scientist, you should tolerate misconducts that you are aware of? And what should you do when you are already known scientist, but taking an action may damage you politically? You see, I'm afraid that there are always 'good' excuses not to act.

Thanks Sigaba. But what if the administrators responsible to act are either indifferent, or help the Professor in a cover-up, instead of taking disciplinary measures?

I like to believe that this is true. Unfortunately, in recent years I learned of too many horror stories. It seems that as funding is getting harder to get, more and more Professor tent to cut corners. "Title IX office should be the appropriate body, however, some schools have Title IX offices that mostly exist to cover up and protect the University. In addition, these results are always confidential and if the offender moves to a different school, no record is transferred. I would like to see expansion of Title IX policy to include a publicly accessible database of investigations that lead to disciplinary actions. However, the current US Government is leaning towards reducing the scope of Title IX. " True, and this is why there is a need for us to act. You brought up the issue of sexual offenders, and how Universities may fail at taking care of even those cases, which are potentially criminal in nature. This one such example for a long saga: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-northwestern-student-sues-professor-book-20170517-story.html "Another way might be for funding agencies to develop their own code of conduct enforcement/investigation team. There could be one single body to regulate all federal public funds for all the public agencies. " Good point. For example even NIH/ORI has a limited jurisdiction to act. They openly acknowledge do not have the resources handling all cases they consider as unethical. Many other agencies inspector generals may luck the personnel investigating scientific misconduct, and may decide not to act whenever the missconduct does not directly involve an abuse of tax payer money.

Well said. I do agree that public enclosure should be done in a responsible way. This why I wrote above "What I'm suggesting is that there is a need for a place were we objectively, carefully and responsibly share knowledge about problematic labs". I'm suggesting a platform where only factual information will be presented, and where the relevant administration failed at taking action.

Thank you for this reply. I agree that searching for retraction history is one thing that may help. But many times, papers are retracted following many years of investigation, when already there many in the scientific community who suspect or even know that there is something wrong with the conduct in lab X, but wouldn't speak about it openly with their students. The story of Marc Hauser is one such example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser Moreover, not all bad lab supervision practices result in a retraction. This is one such example for how a professor can harm a lab member for actually being the victim and then doing the right thing to protect herself and the rest of the lab: https://www.nature.com/scitable/forums/women-in-science/misconduct-in-research-at-yale-118277028 What I'm suggesting is that there is a need for a place were we objectively, carefully and responsibly share knowledge about problematic labs. This forum may serve this task. But there might be a need for a dedicated platform. This blog is aiming at this, providing information on several cases that are not published yet, but we need to have more: https://sciencewatchblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/06/preventing-unethical-practices-in-science/

How to select the right supervisor, or avoid the wrong one? Does anyone know other sources similar to this: https://sciencewatchblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/06/preventing-unethical-practices-in-science/