By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
Scientists and field researchers are taking ethics more seriously after last year's Hwang Woo-suk scandal rattled the academic circle, the government said.
The Ministry of Science and Technology said Monday that a total of 96 public and private laboratories in South Korea have set up verification systems for their R&D projects since last October to fight deep-rooted plagiarism and fabrication of research work. Only 15 schools or institutions had such a fact-checking process before, the ministry said.
The ministry also said that it would distribute a guidebook on research ethics to some 500 schools and public institutions in October.
``Characters of researchers, lack of established verification systems and excessive competition have caused fraudulent studies,'' the ministry said. ``We need to improve the environment so that researchers are evaluated by the quality of their works, not by the quantity.''
Several renowned schools have been embarrassed by a series of ethics scandals involving renowned professors.
Early last year, Hwang, who was a veterinary professor of Seoul National University, shocked the nation when his much-praised research on human stem cell cloning was found to be based on cooked data. He was belatedly expelled by the university and the government rescinded its financial and legal support.
Korea University was similarly disgraced earlier this year. Its President Lee Pil-sang resigned only after 56 days on the job as the university's panel concluded he plagiarized six research papers and published same papers under different titles. Such was the customary practice, he said before quitting, which was later proven true as a number of similar frauds were revealed thereafter.
Schools and authorities now demand more scrupulousness from researchers. Seoul University opened a mandatory ethics class for all of its graduate students. Korea University established a set of regulations on publishing dissertations.
``The people at Hwang's laboratory didn't have a log on their experiments. So after the incident, all researchers are forced to record all their experiment data on a `lab note' before they go home,'' a Ph.D. student at Seoul National University's biology lab said.
An engineer at the Korea Electric Power Research Institute said that he and his colleagues are now forced to attend ethics classes every so often.
``I'm not sure whether the Hwang case prompted this, or it is just a global trend,'' he said. ``But the classes started around that time.''