Open Science and Research Integrity | AISA 3rd Annual Conference

Italy is probably the country of the Western world where obsession for labels of excellence is shaping more profoundly institutions and researchers behaviors. A growing centralized control, emerging from research assessment exercises, is realized through apparently technical devices, the scientific probing of which sparks a conflict between political, scientific and ethical dimensions. In this contribution, the attention is focused on the experiment carried out and analyzed by the Italian agency for reseach assessment (ANVUR) for validating the methodology adopted for research assessment. A detailed description is done of the dissemination efforts made by the agency that published excerpts of official reports in working papers of many institutions, scholarly journals and think-tank blogs. We highlight the unprecedented conflict of interest: the metodology and results of the research assessment were justified ex-post by papers written by the same scholars that had developed and applied the methodology officially adopted by the Italian government. Moreover, no replication of these results is possible because the data were not made available to scholars other than those working for ANVUR.