Science and Research Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2024

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Would you like to make any comment before we conclude?

[Dylan Hanley]

I'd echo what both of my colleagues had to say.

I think we're at the front end of really appreciating the contributions that indigenous knowledge can make in all sorts of different areas of science and research. I agree that it isn't a dichotomy or a competition between the two. I think environmental stewardship is just the easiest one to pick on. If you look at indigenous approaches to forestry and sustainable harvesting from the land, you'll see that they're great examples of the contributions that can be made there.

I watched some of the testimony from last week. The conversation around the need for a diversity of perspectives, which I think we all agree with.... A diversity of perspectives doesn't just mean progressive and conservative; it means where you come from and your lived experience. In this country, we're privileged to have a large indigenous population from which we can learn a lot.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

How much time do I have left?

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

You have four seconds.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you very much for your perspectives.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you.

We'll now turn to MP Blanchette-Joncas for two and a half minutes, please.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Miller, your group claims to promote equity, diversity and inclusion, while emphasizing academic excellence. I would like you to explain how you reconcile these two goals. We know that excellence, by nature, depends on selection criteria, such as university rankings and impact factors that may exclude certain languages, disciplines or local contexts.

[Gabriel Miller]

It's important. How can we change the approach to research assessment in order to support excellence in a diverse and balanced system? This work is ongoing. Your comments focus on one issue, which is the key priority of ensuring that assessments look beyond the number of publications. This must be a current and future priority.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Ms. Johnston, I'm pleased to see you back at the committee.

In your opinion, are college researchers less deserving and less excellent than university researchers? Current funding criteria are based on bibliometrics. This places their work at a disadvantage, since it focuses on applied research rather than the publication of scientific articles.

[Pari Johnston]

Did you ask whether I think that they're less excellent?

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Do you think that research funding criteria currently penalize researchers who conduct applied research, as is the case in colleges, institutes and CEGEPs?

[Pari Johnston]

I think that we need to broaden our criteria to take better account of the fact that college researchers carry out collaborative research. This research always focuses on solving a problem. The criteria must include the relevance and scope of the research.

However, our current criteria are a bit too narrow. We must broaden the scope depending on the impact of our research.

Yes, college researchers are penalized.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you.

You had five seconds left.

We'll now turn to MP Cannings for two and a half minutes.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

I'll turn to Mr. Hanley to talk about this idea of the pressure to publish papers.

We heard some statistics of, I think, 22 papers that had a bad peer review. I just checked online and there are between two and eight million papers published per year, so 22 are probably fairly insignificant in that overall total. It points to the fact that there's this real pressure on researchers to publish, both for career advancement and to get grant money.

Could you expand on how we measure the impact and excellence of that research when we're funding research in Canada? That's the gist of this study.

[Dylan Hanley]

It's a great question.

Although I did a graduate degree, I'm not a researcher by background or training, as you are.

Again, we take academic fraud extraordinarily seriously. I do think it's a tiny percentage. Especially when you're talking about critical scientific studies, it still is important beyond the reputation of the university. It's critical for the credibility of the entire scientific method. It gives credence to conspiracy theories and all sorts of other odious things in society. I think we do need to stand on guard against it.

With regard to the impact of research across Canada, I will say, to your previous question about the provinces, I think that research and especially some of the excellence-based projects—CFREF is a good example—really serve to bring researchers together across different universities and regions. Yes, there's sort of a home base institution for these projects, but all of them have clusters and partnerships that span the country and bring together researchers across the country who are at the top of their fields, as well as non-profit organizations, businesses and others, in those projects that are really meant as an “own the podium” type of exercise for Canada.

This is really about building platforms up that help us compete on the global stage.

Again, research impacts our lives every day, whether it's cardiac research that saves the lives of Canadians, or research on lipid nanoparticles that you're familiar from UBC that helped unlock mRNA vaccines, or social research or economic theory, or whatever, that solves problems and gives us new perspectives on issues.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

That's our time.

Thank you so much to our witnesses, Pari Johnston, Dylan Hanley and Gabriel Miller, for your testimony and participating in the committee studies.

Please see the clerk for any questions. If you have any additional information you would like to submit, you may do so through the clerk.

We're going to suspend very briefly now to allow the witnesses to leave. We'll resume with our second panel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Welcome back.

We'll get started again so that we can finish in good time.

This is a brief reminder for those participating by video conference to click on the microphone icon to activate your mike, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking. For interpretation for those on Zoom, you have the choice at the bottom of your screen of the floor, English or French.

It's now my pleasure to welcome, from Polytechnics Canada, Sarah Watts-Rynard, the chief executive officer. From Research Canada: An Alliance for Health Discovery, we have Alison Evans, president and chief executive officer. We have online, from Retraction Watch, Ivan Oransky, co-founder.

We welcome you.

Up to five minutes will be given to each of you for opening remarks after which we will proceed with rounds of questions.

Ms. Watts-Rynard, I invite you to make an opening statement of up to five minutes.

[Sarah Watts-Rynard, Chief Executive Officer, Polytechnics Canada]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'm pleased to be back before this committee as you study the criteria being used to award federal research funding.

Polytechnics and institutes of technology have now been engaged in Canada's research ecosystem for more than 20 years. As experts at partner-driven research, these institutions help organizations of all sizes adopt, implement and commercialize new products and processes through applied research. Despite two decades of doing this work, there are a number of barriers to accessing federal research funding. For the purposes of my remarks today, I'll focus on three.

There is the minimal access to research support funding, a poor understanding of the salary composition of principal investigators at polytechnics, and adjudication criteria that favour research and publication-intensive CVs.

Let's start with the first. The federal government invests more than $450 million each year in the research support fund. According to this fund's website, it supports post-secondary institutions to maintain modern labs and equipment, secure research from threats, enable research management and administrative support and meet regulatory and ethical standards. For polytechnics and colleges, this fund is largely beyond reach. In fact, together they share about half of one per cent of the research support fund. The college and community innovation program is excluded from eligibility calculations, and this means there is virtually no funding for administrative support, research security or maintaining labs and equipment. These activities must be funded elsewhere.

Moving on to the second barrier, polytechnics and colleges hire faculty to be in the classroom and, while their university counterparts are compensated for spending part of their time on research activities, polytechnic instructors have a full teaching load and, as a result, experts drawn from the classroom to participate in research must be backfilled. This wouldn't be a barrier at all if federal research funding programs had faculty release provisions for those who need them. Instead, because programs are built for the university model, my member institutions are actively disadvantaged right from the proposal stages, and this means that winning conditions are missing.

Barrier number three drives to the heart of the matter. The vast majority of federal grants are built on an application process geared to individual principal investigators. Applications are often evaluated based on the background of an individual who is preparing the application. For example, it's relatively common in grant competitions to judge the merit of a proposal by the quality, quantity and significance of past experience and publications.

In the polytechnic context, applied research is a team effort. While research projects are often led by faculty members, activity is delivered out of the office of applied research. While this approach has no diminishing effect on the quality of the research, it raises challenges to participation in a system that is based around the expertise of a single individual. While peer review and research excellence are absolutely important criteria when awarding federal research funding, they aren't sufficient on their own. The current system has a bias toward research that is done in the same way by the same kind of researcher, as it has been well before polytechnics and colleges had even begun developing their research capacity, and this is quite restrictive.

To fully utilize Canada's ecosystem, the process by which funding is awarded must be reviewed and reconsidered.

Thank you very much for inviting me today, and I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you very much.

We will now turn to Alison Evans for an opening statement of up to five minutes.

[Alison Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer, Research Canada: An Alliance for Health Discovery]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Members of the Standing Committee on Science and Research, thank you for inviting me to speak as part of your study on the impact of the criteria for awarding federal funding on research excellence in Canada.

My name is Alison Evans. I am the CEO of Research Canada, which is an alliance for health discovery and innovation. Our 130-plus members include hospital research institutes, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, med-tech and AI start-ups, post-secondary institutions, provincial health organizations and health charities. Through Research Canada, we work together and with national partners, stakeholders and governments on shared interests. They include the vision of a vibrant, productive, world-leading health research and innovation system, one where better outcomes are pursued by teams in hospital research institutes and corporate and academic labs and through clinical trials and at the bedside. Such a system is critical if we are going to address the declining health and wealth of Canadians and reassert this country on the global stage.

Our most complex societal challenges increasingly require novel solutions and approaches that bring together many perspectives from diverse domains. Research is more international, collaborative and interdisciplinary. We need to respond by continually improving a research support system that exemplifies excellence and integrity; fosters collaboration amongst researchers and entrepreneurs and institutions and companies; strengthens our ability and capacity to respond to health, environment, economic, demographic, energy, technology and other opportunities and challenges; helps us attract, support and retain top talent; recognizes that knowledge is created by investigator-initiated research today and that this same research will help us drive the mission-driven needs of tomorrow; and takes calculated risks and uses evidence to inform continuous improvement.

We welcome this timely dialogue on how we fund research and today’s conversation about research excellence in all its forms. Of course, it's a broad term, and thus necessitates comprehensive and continual consideration. It encompasses how research is designed, conducted, assessed, funded and used. It's context-specific, and acknowledges that flexible, tailored approaches are required. It adjusts as new evidence comes to light and as science and society evolve.

In Canada, upholding research excellence is an aspiration and responsibility held by many federal granting agencies and other funders. Using independent, competitive, structured merit review processes guides the decision-making. In the case of health, these processes help strengthen our entire “research to impact” pipeline, from discovery, applied, mission-driven and translational research to the study of health care delivery itself; to the implementation of novel and life-saving treatments and processes, including AI, into the health care system; and to our preparedness for future pandemics and other health emergencies.

We're fortunate in Canada to have many who protect and promote research excellence for which Canada is globally renowned. Through the work of the advisory panel on federal research support and those that came before them—granting agencies, governments, other funders and countless stakeholders—we are collectively trying to seize the moment that's before us to modernize our research and innovation system to ensure greater agility, responsiveness and impact for all.

In this changing world, unfortunately, Canada is falling behind. Talent, innovation and competitive gaps are widening between Canada and other advanced economies. Our declining health, prosperity and quality of life must be addressed in new ways. We must use long-standing strengths and our growing prominence in areas like AI, clean energy, biotech and life sciences; our highly educated population; and our approaches to excellence to reassert ourselves globally and drive economic growth, prosperity, job creation and outcomes that matter for all Canadians.

I would be pleased to discuss this further.

I'm now ready to take questions from the committee members.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you very much.

Now we'll turn to our final witness.

Mr. Oransky, you have the floor for five minutes, please.

[Dr. Ivan Oransky, Co-Founder, Retraction Watch]

Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to present my views on this important issue today.

I'm a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a non-profit news organization based in the U.S., which reports on scientific misconduct and reactions to it by universities, publishers and funding agencies, among other issues. We also maintain the world's most comprehensive database of scholarly retractions for Crossref, another non-profit that acquired the database in 2023.

I'm also a distinguished journalist in residence at New York University's Arthur Carter Journalism Institute and editor-in-chief of The Transmitter, a publication covering neuroscience.

I base my comments on 14 years of reporting and writing about relevant issues at Retraction Watch.

Last year, there were well over 10,000 retractions from the scholarly literature. Of note, just dozens of 2023's 10,000 plus retractions included researchers affiliated with Canadian universities. While that 10,000 figure was an 88% jump from 2022, the growth reflects an overall trend since the turn of the century.

Increased scrutiny of the literature is largely responsible for that rise, but 2023 revealed that a significant portion of what is published every year—conservative estimates are at least 2%, although it is likely higher—is produced simply to game the metrics that determine career and institutional success.

I wish to quote Dan Pearson, who studies how researchers can engage larger audiences: "Academic publishing is a game. And a lucrative one for those who win."

That gaming is in large part being carried out by what are known as “paper mills”—shady organizations that sell papers to researchers desperate to publish lest their careers perish. They also sell authorships, and our reporting has revealed that some of these companies even bribe editors to publish papers by their clients.

All of this is an entirely predictable response to standard incentives in academia. Universities around the world demand that researchers publish a high volume of papers—as many as possible in prestigious journals. That's because influential international rankings, such as those created by Times Higher Education prioritize citations, which are, of course, references to a researcher's work in subsequent papers.

Citations are very easy to game, as paper mills know. Knowing that citation counts are an oft-used metric to judge the quality and impact of research, citation cartels ensure that members' citation counts rise. All of this means that there is an uncomfortable truth behind the press releases, advertisements and other material universities and countries use to crow about their high rankings,. These rankings are based on a house of cards built with a stacked deck.

With good intentions, it's easy for governments and funding agencies to fall into the same trap. After all, we all rely on heuristics, apparently validated shortcuts, if you will, to make decisions, particularly when faced with a large number of choices, but citation heuristics pave the road to bad behaviour and retractions.

China offers a lesson here. Their publishing incentives have been among the most extreme in the world, and while they do top some impact and innovation rankings, they also top a ranking they probably wish they didn't: more than half of retractions in the world are by authors affiliated with Chinese universities.

I was therefore pleased to learn, as the committee heard from Jeremy Kerr last week, that five major Canadian research funding agencies have signed on to the Declaration on Research Assessment, also known as DORA. Others have suggested that instead of counting papers and citations, funders examine a small selection of papers chosen by researchers being evaluated: In other words, quality over quantity.

Such efforts will require effort and resources, but progress in research is worth it.

Thank you for your time. I welcome the opportunity to expand on my comments during the Q and A with members of the committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you to our witnesses for those opening remarks.

I'll now open the floor to questions.

Please be sure to indicate to whom your questions are directed.

We'll start off our six-minute round, please, with MP Viersen.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to thank our witnesses for being here today.

Mr. Oransky, I'd like to begin my questions with you.

As we heard in your opening statement, Retraction Watch reports on scientific misconduct and retractions by many corporations. I have many questions regarding much of the things you've said, but one thing I wanted to draw to the attention of the committee was something that you had on your website. It is an article on your website titled, “Psychiatrist in Canada faked brain imaging data in grant application, U.S. Federal Watchdog says”.

I read in Retraction Watch that Romina Mizrahi received grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for nearly three million Canadian dollars and worked on this in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, where it appears that none of her papers have been retracted yet.

My question is, by rewarding the pursuit of publishing, how are we getting taxpayer dollars valued in this?