He added: “The issue of integrity in research work is gaining in importance in academic circles around the world, as the method used to measure the research success, which relies heavily on counting the number of academic publications and the number of times they are cited, has led to numerous violations, from the adjustment of results to so-called ‘honorary authorship’ (the inclusion of researchers who took no part in the research), along with a range of other examples of academic malpractice. The University of Ljubljana is aware of these problems and has therefore set up a special organisational unit, which will focus on integrity in research work mainly by making all UL staff aware of how important it is to maintain that integrity. In the last two years we have put in place a system for assessing research work based on the high-quality evaluation of academic achievements – one that does not reward the highest number of academic publications, but their importance for scholarship and society.

As various instances of malpractice make the news and social awareness grows of the harm that unethical and questionable academic practices cause, more and more research institutions are becoming aware of the importance of values, awareness-raising, training, addressing problems as they arise and cultivating an organisational culture that encourages ethics and integrity – for reasons of their own credibility and excellence as well as of public trust in research and science,” said Professor Nina Peršak, who has taken over leadership of the unit. She added that research (or academic) ethics and integrity encompassed ethical conduct and integrity throughout the research process itself, from the writing of a project application to the publication of research results, as well as wider ethical conduct and integrity in research institutions and the broader academic arena. Universities are the key authorities here, as they bear a special social responsibility: to educate individuals that respect (and represent a working environment that respects) the basic postulates of research ethics and integrity, and successfully address violations and potential new risks in this area, such as the abuse and endangering of research security and the challenges of generative AI.

Professor Nina Peršak

Professor Nina Peršak has a doctorate in law and master’s in social and developmental psychology (Ljubljana and Cambridge). She is highly experienced in the fields of research ethics, ethical assessments of research proposals and the monitoring of research projects that have already received funding from the EU and at national and regional level within the EU, and conducts various types of training in research ethics and integrity. Her other research interests, in addition to ethics and integrity, are criminal law, human rights, criminology, social psychology and victimology. Professor Peršak is an academic adviser at Ghent University, where she has been a professor for a number of years, and co-director of the “Equality and Criminal Justice” working group at the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination (BCCE) at UC Berkeley. She serves on the editorial boards of several international journals and is a member of a number of international expert bodies and networks, including the European Network for Research Ethics and Integrity (ENERI).