“The notion of scientific integrity in and of itself does not escape historical reformulation.”

white card. The topic of scientific integrity is in the news, as plagiarism scandals spread. This has led to the awareness of the scientific authorities as evidenced by the creation of the French Office of Scientific Integrity, entrusted to the philosopher of science Stephanie Ruffy, or the establishment of ethical rules by the British Parliament and the European Union Foundation for Science. It reaffirms the common principles of good practice in scientific work, based on values “Reliability, honesty, respect and responsibility” (European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, 2018).

At the same time, many mass publications on the history of science remind us of the peculiarity of the current situation. Thus, in Manipulating metrics: misconduct and manipulation in academic research (MIT Press, 2020, open access, untranslated), Mario Biagioli and Alexandra Lipman, following the pioneering work of Yves Gingeras, analyze how indicators for measuring scientific production models weigh bad practices by legitimizing a culture of ‘scrutiny’ in the scientific world and by encouraging “Manipulation of Quantitative Indicators” What are citation networks or peer reviews.

The repeated commandments of “influence,” the obsession with international rankings, and the game of “predatory” scientific journals ordering articles underscore the paradoxes of this moral economics of contemporary science. Beyond the inevitability publish or die (publish or annihilate), it really shows the extent and variety of these deviations, from spam to spurious archives, including fake demos. In the face of the impotence of the traditional system of Peer review To identify all these frauds, “cognitive activists” were seen investigating, but without any court order.

Fraud has always had a job

British review History of science Dedicate, in December 2020, a special edition for Scientific Integrity. Edited by Otto Seibom, Cyrus Moody and Lisa Roberts, providing a long-term historical perspective, the publication also draws attention to the shifting line between legal and illegal. The authors remember that “reformers” use a consistent and universal repertoire, which distinguishes between “good” and “bad” science, without taking into account efforts to date scientific concepts such as objectivity, scientific authorship, or experiment that historians have carried out for decades.

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