Way back in early February, we discussed the findings of the misconduct inquiry against Michael Mann, an inquiry that Penn State University mounted in the wake of “numerous communications (emails, phone calls, and letters) accusing Dr. Michael E. Mann of having engaged in acts that included manipulating data, destroying records and colluding to hamper the progress of scientific discourse around the issue of global warming from approximately 1998″. Those numerous communications, of course, followed upon the well-publicized release of purloined email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia — the storm of controversy known as ClimateGate.
You may recall that the misconduct inquiry, whose report (PDF) is here, looked into four allegations against Dr. Mann and found no credible evidence to support three of them. On the fourth allegation, the inquiry committee was unable to make a definitive finding. Here’s what I wrote about the inquiry committee’s report on this allegation:

[T]he inquiry committee is pointing out that researchers at the university has a duty not to commit fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism, but also a positive duty to behave in such a way that they maintain the public’s trust. The inquiry committee goes on to highlight specific sections of policy AD-47 that speak to cultivating intellectual honesty, being scrupulous in presentation of one’s data (and careful not to read those data as being more robust than they really are), showing due respect for their colleagues in the community of scholars even when they disagree with their findings or judgments, and being clear in their communications with the public about when they are speaking in their capacity as researchers and when they are speaking as private citizens. …
[W]e’re not just looking at scientific conduct here. Rather, we’re looking at scientific conduct in an area about which the public cares a lot.
What this means is that the public here is paying rather more attention to how climate scientists are interacting with each other, and to the question of whether these interactions are compatible with the objective, knowledge-building project science is supposed to be.
[T]he purloined emails introduce new data relevant to the question of whether Dr. Mann’s research activities and interactions with other scientists — both those with whose conclusions he agrees and those with whose conclusions he does not agree — are consistent with or deviate from accepted scientific practices.
Evaluating the data gleaned from the emails, in turns, raises the question of what the community of scholars and the community of research scientists agree counts as accepted scientific practices.

Decision 4. Given that information emerged in the form of the emails purloined from CRU in November 2009, which have raised questions in the public’s mind about Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research activity, given that this may be undermining confidence in his findings as a scientist, and given that it may be undermining public trust in science in general and climate science specifically, the inquiry committee believes an investigatory committee of faculty peers from diverse fields should be constituted under RA-10 to further consider this allegation.

In sum, the overriding sentiment of this committee, which is composed of University administrators, is that allegation #4 revolves around the question of accepted faculty conduct surrounding scientific discourse and thus merits a review by a committee of faculty scientists. Only with such a review will the academic community and other interested parties likely feel that Penn State has discharged it responsibility on this matter.

What this means is that the investigation of allegation #4 that will follow upon this inquiry will necessarily take up the broad issue of what counts as accepted scientific practices. This discussion, and the findings of the investigation committee that may flow from it, may have far reaching consequences for how the public understands what good scientific work looks like, and for how scientists themselves understand what good scientific work looks like.

Accordingly, an Investigatory Committee was constituted and charged to examine that fourth allegation, and its report (PDF) has just been released. We’re going to have a look at what the Investigatory Committee found, and at its strategies for getting the relevant facts here.
Since this report is 19 pages long (the report of the inquiry committee was just 10), I won’t be discussing all the minutiae of how the committee was constituted, nor will I be discussing this report’s five page recap of the earlier committee’s report (since I’ve already discussed that report at some length). Instead, I’ll be focusing on this committee’s charge:

The Investigatory Committee’s charge is to determine whether or not Dr. Michael Mann engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities.

and on the particular strategies the Investigatory Committee used to make this determination.
Indeed, establishing what might count as a serious deviation from accepted practices within the academic community is not trivially easy (which is one reason people have argued against appending the “serious deviations” clause to fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism in official definitions of scientific misconduct). Much turns on the word “accepted” here. Are we talking about the practices a scientific or academic community accepts as what members of the community ought to do, or about practices that are “accepted” insofar as members of the community actually do them or are aware of others doing them (and don’t do a whole lot to stop them)? The Investigatory Committee here seems to be trying to establish what the relevant scientific community accepts as good practices, but there are a few places in the report where the evidence upon which they rely may merely establish the practices the community tolerates. There is a related question about whether the practices the community accepts as good can be counted on reliably to produce the good outcomes the community seems to assume they do, something I imagine people will want to discuss in the comments.
Let’s dig in. Because of how much there is to discuss, we’ll take it in three posts. This post will focus on the committee’s interviews with Dr. Mann and with Dr. William Easterling, Dean, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University (and Mann’s boss, to the degree that the Dean of one’s College is one’s boss).
The second post will examine the committee’s interviews with Dr. William Curry, Senior Scientist, Geology and Geophysics Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Dr. Jerry McManus, Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University; and Dr. Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The third post will then examine the other sources of information besides the interviews that the Investigatory Committee relied upon to establish what counts as accepted practices within the academic community (and specifically within the community of climate scientists) for proposing, conducting, or reporting research. All blockquotes from here on out are from the Investigatory Committee’s final report unless otherwise noted.

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