Science Integrity Alliance asks Dr Mark Hooper, Founder of Tricky Goose Training.

[SIA] Tell us about Tricky Goose Training.

[MH] Tricky Goose Training designs online training courses for researchers and students — primarily about research quality, ethics, and integrity. We’re based in Australia, but we work globally. We’re currently partnering with leading institutions in Australia, the UK, and the US.

[SIA] How do you notice scientific integrity differs between those regions?

[MH] Different regions adopt different codes of practice, and even between institutions there are different points of emphasis. One institution might emphasize reproducibility, another might want to promote good publication choices, and another may be focused on data management. Ultimately, though, scientific integrity is a global issue, just as science is a global enterprise. Tricky Goose partners with institutions to customize our core content to suit their region’s regulatory environment and their institution’s own policies, resources and contacts.

[SIA] Speaking of customization, we recently worked together on a Research Integrity page for the LEARN Hub.

[MH] Yes! We really enjoyed partnering with the Alliance on that project. We wrote a brief introduction to research integrity, which is available for re-use on our downloads page with lots of other free content. We love how you adapted it! Your graphics and interactive elements are fantastic. I would encourage everybody to check it out.

[SIA] Finally, we have to ask, why the name Tricky Goose?

[MH] So many training providers bury important academic topics in the language of compliance. Scientific integrity is too important to ruin with “compliance training”. We take research integrity seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. And you couldn’t mistake “Tricky Goose” for a boring compliance company, could you? We design education to engage smart academics — deeper, more scholarly, more fun.