Last year the National Academy of Public Administration developed a proposal to perform an “ethics audit” of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The proposal was a response, at NIH’s request, to persistent concerns from members of Congress and others that numerous NIH employees had conflicts of interest arising from their compensated activities outside of the agency.
Rumor had it that the resulting NAPA proposal contained in a January 2006 report was “not what NIH wanted, so they simply buried the paper after it was given to the Director.”
“One of the … people who felt it got deep-sixed thought it would be of interest to the NIH research community,” a friendly tipster wrote.
Secrecy News requested the document under the Freedom of Information Act, and it was promptly released by NIH.
See “Enhancing Risk Management at the National Institutes of Health Through an Audit of the Ethics Program,” prepared by a National Academy of Public Administration Staff Study Team, January 2006 (4 MB PDF file).
By better harnessing the power of data, we can build a learning healthcare system where outcomes drive continuous improvement and where healthcare value leads the way.
In this unprecedented inflection point (and time of difficult disruption) for higher education, science funding, and agency structure, we have an opportunity to move beyond incremental changes and advocate for bold, new ideas that envision a future of the scientific research enterprise that looks very different from the current system.
Assigning persistent digital identifiers (Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs) and using ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor IDs) for key personnel to track outputs for research grants will improve the accountability and transparency of federal investments in research and reduce reporting burden.
Research funding agencies should apply the content of grant applications to AI tools to predict the future of scientific and technological breakthroughs, enhance peer review, and encourage better research investment decisions by both the public and the private sector.