Can Open Access Journals Help Uphold the Value of Research Integrity?

摘要

Recently, the New York Times published an article about a fraud case in which a psychologist from the Netherlands was reported to have published his research using falsified data [2]. This article should serve as a wakeup call to many of us, organizational researchers and journal editors alike. Although research misconduct has remained largely anecdotal in our field of business, and outright fabrication of an entire experiment for publication in top tier journals such as the case of Professor Diederik Stapel at Tilburg University in the Netherlands [2] has not been heard of in organizational science; indirect evidence of such research misconduct has recently been reported among management researchers [1]. It is high time we addressed the issue of research integrity at the Journal of Business and Financial Affairs while the journal is still in its infancy. We certainly do not want to be in the position of highly respected journals such as the Science where Professor Stapel published an article based on a fraudulent dataset. In this commentary, I will discuss open access as a potential solution to mitigate misconduct in organizational research.