CLEAR Task Force

Publication and Scientific Ethics

Charter

CLEAR: Task Force on “Community-Led Ethics for Accountability in Research”

Publication and Scientific Ethics

Computing as a discipline has experienced tremendous success and growth throughout its life, especially in the last decade or so, with major breakthroughs impacting science and society significantly, industry booming, etc. As a result, the size of our community has been increasing continuously, and research progress has been accelerating at unprecedented rates. Unfortunately, being victims of our success, the number of submitted and (eventually) published papers has exploded, the pressure to publish has reached new heights, the availability of time to review papers has reached new lows, and evaluation of research(ers) has often been reduced from “reading” to “counting”. This scholarly communication environment has allowed several painful phenomena of unethical behavior to flourish in various stages of the research lifecycle, such as the following examples:

  • Data falsification
  • Junior team-member coersion
  • Collusion networks
  • Gift authorship and gift citations
  • Reviewer coersion
  • Undeclared CoIs and long-term indirect CoIs
  • Micro-satisfaction of CoI policies (counting months or days)
  • Paper mills
  • Parallel submissions
  • Plagiarism and self-plagiarism
  • Unfair use of LLMs
  • …

CLEAR Task Force

The CLEAR Task Force (Community-Led Ethics for Accountability in Research) is formed on the initiative of the Computing Research Association (CRA), as a meeting point of similar efforts that were also planned in other computing societies, such as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Coordinated by ACM, the members of CLEAR will be representatives of CRA society members as well as other individuals from the computing community. CLEAR is broadly tasked with looking into the growing phenomena of unethical behavior in scientific research and publication practices in computing and identifying steps that our community can take to make them disappear.

Responsibilities

CLEAR should work on at least the following tasks:

  • Map the (unfortunately vast) landscape of violations (as exemplified above) of the ethical principles of conduct that underly our scientific methodologies and publication practices
  • Identify the root causes of the explosion in the number of violations we are experiencing currently, e.g., “publish or perish” philosophy in researchers’ evaluation, different interpretations of ethical principles by people from different cultural backgrounds, …
  • Devise mechanisms to increase our violation detection abilities, e.g., maintain a community-wide knowledge graph of all scholarly and professional roles a person has played in their lifetime, such as co-author of a paper, co-author of 10s of submissions to the same conference, bidder and/or reviewer of a submission and corresponding score, employee or visitor at an institution, …
  • Explore solutions to address the problem, proactively, g., informing and training our community, reactively, e.g., identifying inventive sanctions and rehabilitation methods, or even holistically, suggesting research(er) evaluation philosophies that diffuse the need for quantity over quality of research publication production.

CLEAR will work with the publications’ boards of the participating societies (especially their committees charged with monitoring scientific ethics and plagiarism) and other volunteers and staff to fully understand the spectrum and nature of violations observed currently. This information will be used to form the landscape map mentioned above and seed the discussions on the other aspects of CLEAR’s work. In the end, CLEAR should specify appropriate pathways to implement all proposed actions as well possible metrics for their success.

Relation to other Task Forces

CLEAR would benefit from interacting with relevant task forces and other volunteer bodies in the participating societies working on themes that include but are not limited to the following:

  • Codes of Ethics and Social Responsibility: to understand how the work of CLEAR may influence (or be influenced by) the principles captured in the Codes
  • Policy Violations: to potentially influence the current formal complaint examination processes used in the societies
  • Globalization or Global Coordination Structures: to exchange information about potential differences in regional thinking as related to publication and scientific ethics.

Processes

As CLEAR is coordinated by ACM, it will need to work with ACM HQ staff to achieve its mandate.

CLEAR Membership

The CLEAR Task force will have a Chair, appointed by the ACM President and the CRA Chair. The members of CLEAR will be representatives of the participating societies and a few other individuals chosen by the ACM President and CRA Chair. The CLEAR Chair may also suggest and recruit qualified individuals for membership, if needed.

The ACM CEO, ACM COO, and the CRA Executive Director and CEO (or designees) will serve as ex officio members.

Timeline

The CLEAR Task Force should anticipate presenting its Final Report six to twelve months after the initiation of its work, depending on the complexity of the issues it will face, with this timeline further extended if that complexity proves extraordinary.