Quality to scienceʼs credibility service
Reliability, traceability and integrity. These are the main points on which the Research Quality Service of the University of Barcelona works. It has been a pioneer service in the Spanish university system since 1994 and it helps improving scientific production for UB researchers. This advising task allowed the introduction of management systems and quality certification such as ISO 9001, ISO 17025 or BPL, essential to place UB centres -the Scientific and Technologic Centres of the UB (CCiTUB) and others such as Environmental Radiology Laboratory, Enteric Viruses Group, research group of Lipid Metabolism LPL and the Research and Development Unit of the Cell Therapy Program- in important sectors such as the chemical-pharmaceutical. However, the quality service is not only a useful tool for the groups that work with companies but also a possible impact on other groups which are interested in improving their daily research.
Reliability, traceability and integrity. These are the main points on which the Research Quality Service of the University of Barcelona works. It has been a pioneer service in the Spanish university system since 1994 and it helps improving scientific production for UB researchers. This advising task allowed the introduction of management systems and quality certification such as ISO 9001, ISO 17025 or BPL, essential to place UB centres -the Scientific and Technologic Centres of the UB (CCiTUB) and others such as Environmental Radiology Laboratory, Enteric Viruses Group, research group of Lipid Metabolism LPL and the Research and Development Unit of the Cell Therapy Program- in important sectors such as the chemical-pharmaceutical. However, the quality service is not only a useful tool for the groups that work with companies but also a possible impact on other groups which are interested in improving their daily research.
Albert Cirera is tenure-track 2 lecturer at the Department of Electronics of the University of Barcelona. He is also a researcher of the MIND Research Group, Micro and Nanotechnology and nanoscopies for Electronic and Electrophonic devices - a group which is growing and has 17 people. This positive dynamic also had its shortcomings in MIND. “When you get to a certain size, you lose control of the totality of the samples, of the experiments, people, information…of everything which is not strict science, but is important to create quality science” he said. This growth increased some problems, specifically regarding the flow of information in the group. “To carry out our work, we receive and create lots of samples, products and prototypes. We have made some mistakes when getting a sample, or having doubts on certain materials… This is bad because it creates distrust among the group and also out of the group” said the researcher.
Improvements without affecting creativity
In this situation, Cirera attended a conference by Carme Navarro, Doctor in Biology in the UB and Director of the Research Quality Service, and saw why they needed the support. During the last three years they have worked together to solve some of these problems. “They helped us verifying different strategies and making them solid… They helped us implementing some coherence but without renouncing to our spirit, which is quite free, or affecting our creativity” said Albert Cirera.
“The research group has to take care of their research, we take care of the quality” said Carme Navarro, who launched the Quality Guarantee Unit in 1994. She currently directs a team of 5 experts and 1 trainee, all of them with experimental sciences training.
More than 30 annual audits and FDA controls
Quality management of CCiTUB is the main task of this team, particularly since in 2005, after 4 years of work, they got the ISO9001 certification, a requirement to negotiate with lots of businesses. “It is not only about launching a quality system and getting the certification but also to keep it over time. We have around 32-33 intern audits per year and receive external audits from companies who want to work with CCiTUB. We have even had two audits by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States” he says.
Reliability, traceability and integrity
Research Quality Service aims to guarantee reliability, traceability and integrity of research. “That is, if a study is carried out in Barcelona, its results should be the same in any other place; everything should be documented in order to trace results if there is something wrong or a new researcher wants to re-take the experiment. It is a way of standardizing and avoiding the appearance of new criteria that can damage our results” said Carme Navarro. Our instruments calibration is another important measure to guarantee the research reliability. The Quality Service facilities of the UB have calibration patterns available for all researchers. “There are people who think that if a tool shows a figure, this has to be the correct one and they donʼt think these instruments have to be calibrated regularly. Researchersʼ task is based on science, not faith. If we calibrate the instrument it is science, if not, it is faith” Carme Navarro pointed out.
Impact on research evaluation
With these fundamental lines and the Quality Service advice, Albert Cireraʼs group has implemented different measures such as the documentation system on samples with resistant stickers -“the ones used in photographic plates”- which link the sample to numbered laboratory notebooks. There have been similar protocols established in equipment, with clear indications about procedures and the responsibles. “All this gives you strength. It is the only way of creating a positive result or discovering what happened if the results are negative. There have been cases of companies with doubts about their own samples and used our identification system to work on it” says the researcher.
This methodology proved its use in intellectual property trials. “A client asked for all the notebooks with data to bring them to a patent trial and show that the obtained results were prior to the ones from another company”, remembers Carme Navarro.
“In science, we make hypotheses and you think you have proved it until someone comes and shows you are wrong. If we are wrong it wonʼt have been due to sample or information management but because our hypothesis were not right or the experimental tools were not the appropriate ones, but not because the team had shared the wrong information” says Albert. In this sense, the researcher thinks that this methodology will have an impact on the evaluation of scientific research. “In the future, some important journals will accept and give priority group studies that follow these policies”. Actually, the importance and impact of the quality systems on research was the main focus of an article published in the scientific journal Nature, where they mentioned the task of the Research Quality Service of the University of Barcelona.
A code of good practises
Some of these work guidelines can be read in the Codi de Bones Pràctiques en Recerca elaborated by a group of experts of the UB under the supervision of the Research Quality Service in 2009. The idea is to give this methodology to any UB researcher and promote a way of work which has implications in science credibility. Specially, in a moment when some studies complain about the lack of production in lots of researches. “We are at a moment in which it is not good that society gets the idea that published studies are not producible and all measures help creating more confidence in science”, concluded Carme Navarro.