Café Espresso avec Jacopo Ambrosj et Frédérique Bordignon sur le « research-integrity washing

Research Integrity (RI) has entered the discourse of virtually every stakeholder in research, including academies of science, publishers, universities, researchers themselves, and so on. In this article, we offer a critical take on discourse about RI by introducing the concept of RI washing. By drawing on a number of sources, we reach an understanding of RI washing as symbolic action, decoupling, or recontextualisation, paired with signalling commitment to RI values and principles. We substantiate our conceptual analysis by applying it to several cases taken from the literature. This will unify under one heading potentially problematic aspects of RI discourse, so far analysed in the literature in a scattered way. This in turn will help clarify the origins of this phenomenon, identify new instances thereof, and set potentially policy-relevant research directions (e.g. research aimed at quantifying RI washing).