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Paper short abstract:

Building on a document analysis of research integrity policy papers of Austrian universities and interviews with those responsible for their translation into institutional practice, we aim to show the different models of governance at work and what imagination of contemporary research they perform.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decades, we witnessed a growing concern over issues of research integrity within contemporary research systems. This was triggered by the perception that numbers of "obvious" transgressions of acceptable academic practice were rising, by concerns around the number of retractions of academic papers and obvious flaws in the peer review system, by undue influence of those funding studies on their epistemic outcomes, but also by the recent concerns captured by the label of "reproducibility crisis".

How do research institutions, in particular universities, react to these challenges and try to adapt/extend the governance processes accordingly? This question will be at the core of our presentation. Building on a document analysis of research integrity policy papers of Austrian universities and interviews with those responsible for their translation into institutional practice, we aim to show the different models of governance at work and what imagination of contemporary research they perform. Furthermore, we will reflect the relation between ideals of excellent science and institutional practices of assuring research integrity. In short, we want to understand better how institutions of research "think" about the research practices they are supposed to foster and the responsibility they have to assure integrity in knowledge production.

This paper will build on research undertaken in the framework of the project "Borderlands of good scientific practice" funded by the Research Fund of the Austrian National Bank and carried out at the research platform "Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice" at the University of Vienna.