Integrating open science practices into recommendations for accepting gambling industry research funding

Abstract

Diverse funding sources, including the government, nonprofit, and industry sectors support academic research, generally, and gambling research, specifically. This funding allows academic researchers to assess gambling-related problems in populations, evaluate tools designed to encourage responsible gambling behaviors, and develop evidence-based recommendations for gambling-related topics. Some stakeholders have raised concern about industry-funded research. These critics argue that industry funding might influence the research process. Such concerns have led to the development of research guidelines that aim to preserve academic independence. Concurrently and independently, researchers have begun to embrace ‘Open Science’ practices (e.g. pre-registration of research questions and hypotheses, open access to materials and data) to foster transparency and create a valid, reliable, and replicable scientific literature. We suggest that Open Science principles and practices can be integrated with existing guidelines for industry-funded research to ensure that the research process is ethical, transparent, and unbiased. In the current paper, we engage with the aforementioned issues and present a formal framework to guide industry-funded research. We outline Guidelines for Research Independence and Transparency (GRIT), which integrates Open Science practices with existing guidelines for industry-funded research. Specifically, we describe how particular Open Science practices can enhance industry-funded research, including research pre-registration, separation of confirmatory and exploratory analyses, open materials, open data availability, and open access to study manuscripts. We offer our guidelines in the context of industry-funded gambling studies, yet researchers can extend these ideas to the behavioral sciences, more generally, and to funding sources of any type.

Keywords:

• Gambling
• open science
• industry funding
• guidelines for industry funding
• pre-registration
• open data

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr. Howard J. Shaffer and Mr. Silas Xuereb for their comments on and editing of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statements

The Division on Addiction currently receives funding from the Addiction Treatment Center of New England via SAMHSA; The Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility (FAAR); DraftKings; the Gavin Foundation via the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA); GVC Holdings, PLC; The Healing Lodge of the Seven Nations via the Indian Health Service with funds approved by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health; The Integrated Centre on Addiction Prevention and Treatment of the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals, Hong Kong; St. Francis House via the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Bureau of Substance Addiction Services; and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas via MGM Resorts International.

During the past five years, the Division on Addiction has also received funding from Aarhus University Hospital with funds approved by The Danish Council for Independent Research; ABMRF – The Foundation for Alcohol Research; Caesars Enterprise Services, LLC; Cambridge Police Department with funds approved by the Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention; the David H. Bor Library Fund, Cambridge Health Alliance; DraftKings; Fenway Community Health Center, Inc.; Heineken USA, Inc.; Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Bureau of Substance Addiction Services; Massachusetts Gaming Commission, Commonwealth of Massachusetts; National Center for Responsible Gaming; and University of Nevada, Las Vegas via MGM Resorts International.

During the past five years, Dr. Eric Louderback has received research funding from a grant issued by the National Science Foundation (NSF), a government agency based in the United States. His research has been financially supported by a Dean's Research Fellowship from the University of Miami College of Arts & Sciences, which also provided funds to present at academic conferences. He has received travel support funds from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to present research findings.

During the past five years, the Carleton University Gambling Laboratory has received research funding from federal granting agencies in Canada and Australia unconnected to Dr. Michael Wohl's gambling research. In relation to his gambling research, he has received research funds from provincial granting agencies in Canada. He has also received direct and indirect research funds from the gambling industry in Canada, United States of America, United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden. Additionally, he has served as a consultant for the gambling industry in Canada, United States of America, United Kingdom, and New Zealand. A detailed list can be found on his curriculum vitae (http://carleton.ca/bettermentlabs/wp-content/uploads/CV.pdf).

During the past five years, Dr. Debi LaPlante has received speaker honoraria and travel support from the National Center for Responsible Gaming (NCRG) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. She has served as a paid grant reviewer for NCRG and received honoraria funds for preparation of a book chapter from Universite Laval. She has received royalties for Harvard Medical distance learning courses and the American Psychiatric Association's, Addiction Syndrome Handbook. She was a non-paid board member of the New Hampshire Council on Problem Gambling. She currently is a non-paid board member of the New Hampshire Council for Responsible Gambling.

Notes

1 Other researchers have debated these findings on industry bias from the sugar industry (Johns and Oppenheimer 2018), instead suggesting that Kearns et al.'s (2016) findings should be understood within the scientific discourse and norms during that historical period.

2 In the spirit of these efforts to provide objective and influential research, the Division on Addiction demonstrated an early commitment to transparency and open science practices through data sharing, especially for its industry-funded research output (see Shaffer et al. 2009; www.thetransparencyproject.org).

3 Notably, this commentary restricts its discussion to published transdisciplinary guidelines for gambling industry funding; however, other discipline-specific professional codes of ethics, such as for the American Psychological Association (https://www.apa.org/ethics/code/), also have some relevance to this discussion.

4 Some models have highlighted the importance of transparency in industry-researcher collaborations (e.g., the HEART model), yet no research to our knowledge has directly identified benefits of specific open science practices for industry-funded studies in the gambling domain.

5 For a detailed discussion of replicability and the importance of replication in the addiction sciences more broadly, see Heirene (In Press; DOI:10.1080/16066359.2020.1751130).

6 Open data provides some general benefits, as well. Unfortunately, reporting errors in published scientific studies do occur (Nuijten et al. 2016). Making data open allows others to reproduce published findings and identify such errors. There is also more than one way a data set can be analyzed, and the data analytic choices a researcher makes can influence results (for a discussion see Silberzahn et al. 2018).

7 Although open science principles and practices support the public posting of research pre-registrations, there are tools available on the Open Science Framework that allow for a temporary embargo period for a pre-registration. By embargoing a pre-registration, the research plan and metadata (e.g., timestamp) are preserved, yet third parties, such as industry funders, are not able to view the research plan for a specified period of time (e.g. 6 months).

8 Very recently (as of writing this article during May 2020), levels of gambling industry funding have declined due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the International Center for Responsible Gambling (ICRG) cancelled all funding opportunities for the year 2020. Researchers should closely follow these developments, because they will likely influence industry-funded research for years to come.