Measures to halt research misconduct

Japan's education ministry plans to start a comprehensive programme to give researchers and students ethical guidance on writing academic papers, after major cases of research misconduct at various institutions, reports Japan Times.

The move was apparently prompted by a series of irregularities at universities and research institutes, including recent dubious articles on stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP, cells. The scientific research institute Riken concluded that the articles, written by its researchers and carried in Nature, contained images that had been altered and falsified.

As has been demonstrated by irregularities in the STAP cell papers, which have damaged the credibility of the entire Japanese scientific community, governance at Japanese universities and research institutions to prevent and identify such misconduct lags behind that of other countries.
Full report on the Japan Times site