Project
This website is the front page for an ongoing research program studying conflicts of interest in the university context, which began in 2006 with funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
2006-2009
In collaboration with Dr. Chris MacDonald (author of the Business Ethics Blog), we initiated a project entitled Conflicting Interests, Benefit-Sharing and University-Industry Relations: A Socio-Ethical Analysis of Commercial Genomics Research, to study institutional conflict of interest (COI) policies at thirteen Canadian research universities. Using online readability analysis tools and an ethical content analysis, we compared the strengths and weaknesses of these documents, with particular attention to their clarity and readability, and their utility in explaining and managing COI (Williams-Jones & MacDonald 2008). In our comparison of university policies, we sought to highlight differences in philosophy and impact between two common approaches, i.e., policies written in a legalistic or an inspirational style (Smith & Williams-Jones 2009). We also conducted an in-depth ethical and legal analysis of the COI policy environment at the Université de Montréal (Couture et al. 2007). To begin identifying some of the COI issues arising in bioscience research, we conducted informal discussions with key informants (bioscience colleagues and students) to elicit their experiences with laboratory culture and the ethical challenges faced by various stakeholders. This allowed us to focus our analysis on professor-student relations in the bioscience laboratory, which we argue is a key element in the generation and management of COI in this setting (MacDonald & Williams-Jones 2009).
2009-2012
In 2009 I received support from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC) and the Ethics Office of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), to conduct 2 projects, 1) to build on the pilot study conducted in 2006/07 to examine a much larger set of University COI policies across Canada and the US, and 2) examine the need for guidelines and training to help research ethics boards better manage COI.