What Is "Accepted Scientific Practice"?

The following report was sent to me by Hal Caswell:

As most everyone knows, in 2009 a number of email messages among climate researchers were stolen from the University of East Anglia. One of the researchers was Dr. Michael Mann at Penn State University. Mann was accused of various kinds of academic misconduct; Penn State carried out an investigation and found no evidence to support the allegations. However, they generated another investigation aimed not at academic misconduct (faking data, etc.), but rather at the more difficult issue of whether Dr. Mann followed "accepted scientific practices" in his conduct. This is more difficult because it involves figuring out what "accepted scientific practices" actually are.

The report of that investigation has recently been released. There is an outstanding 3-part discussion of the report on the blog Adventures in Ethics and Science, with lots of links to the official reports and to other sources for this important investigation. As part of their task, the investigators interviewed several scientists to get their opinions about accepted practice; one of those was WHOI's own Bill Curry.

Here are the links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.