On Legal Intervention Of Scientific Misconduct

Recent years have witnessed an emerging phenomenon of scientific fraud, infringement, and corruption as well as academic anomie and scientific misconduct, which have not only drawn extensive attention within the scientific community but also resulted in a world-wide in-depth discussion on scientific misconduct. Undoubtedly, since scientific misconduct has severely undermined the atmosphere of scientific community and impeded normal scientific activities, it would cause unbearable consequences if we still leave it alone. Events occurred in different countries and fields have caused tremendous commotion all over the globe. Scientific misconduct, however, hasn't declined because of people's increasing attention, instead it has been developing even more intensive in the new century when various countries put more emphasis on scientific development.It is noteworthy that scientific misconduct continues despite repeated prohibitions in foreign countries, it can always be seen in China even though China has taken a series of precautionary measures. However, current research work on scientific misconduct has mainly focused on scientific morality construction and norm-setting of science. It is widely believed that improprieties in the scientific community should not be intervened by law since they are related to moral and academic issues. Due to the fact that current countermeasures for scientific misconduct are more likely to handle it by scientific community internal self-regulation from moral aspect that lacks legal intervention approaches. Despite there are specific laws such as Scientific and Technological Progress Law, they are mostly normative regulations for scientific activities without detailed legal countermeasures to handle scientific conduct.Combining the knowledge on philosophical theories of science and technology, the author expounds the definition and explanation of scientific misconduct at home and abroad using literature research method, interdisciplinary perspectives, and comparative method, analyzes the different characteristics in behavioral object, behavioral agent, and behavioral result, etc. of scientific misconduct, explains the cause of scientific misconduct by analyzing legal supervision, utilitarianism, social morality changes, research resource allocation and competition, and research system deficiencies, etc., summarizes the necessity and feasibility of legal intervention with scientific misconduct by analyzing the interactive effects between laws and scientific misconduct and the effect of legal intervention on scientific misconduct, and presents the major existing problems and causes in legal intervention with scientific misconduct, followed by the following suggestions: strengthen legal publicity, improve scientific workers' legal awareness, and popularize legal concepts; promote legal society construction, and provide a foundation for legal culture; give full play to the supervising roles of scientific talents, and perfect the legal supervision mechanism for science and technology; integrate current legal intervention resources on scientific misconduct, and build a complete legal norm system; accelerate the reform of judicial and law enforcement mechanism and system for science and technology, and make coordination between administrative agencies and judicial and inspection branches.