The Ethics of Astronomy

Kate Pattle, UCL – STFC Summer School 2025 – 02/09/25

Outline

• Research ethics
• Bullying and Harassment
• Codes of Conduct
• Paper authorship and publishing
• Use of LLMs
• Land rights
• Environmental issues

Research ethics – as described by the IAU

• Research should be carried out with honesty and integrity
• Data and research results should be maintained in a form that allows review and reproduction by others
• Researchers involved in funded studies or allocated telescope time should make results available in a timely manner
• The fabrication, falsification or selective reporting of data with the intent to mislead or deceive is unethical, as is the appropriation of unpublished proprietary data or research results from others without permission and attribution

https://www.iau.org/Iau/Iau/About/Statutes---Rules/Code-of-Conduct.aspx

Research ethics – as described by the IAU

“Everyone involved in activities of the IAU should treat others with professional respect and equal consideration in both written and spoken communication. They should work to provide an environment that encourages equality of opportunity and the free expression and exchange of scientific ideas.”

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“While it is reasonable to refute other works based on respectful scientific arguments, it is unethical to include personal attacks or derogatory language.”

https://www.iau.org/Iau/Iau/About/Statutes---Rules/Code-of-Conduct.aspx

Bullying and Harassment

• Your university should have formal mechanisms in place to deal with any incidences of bullying and/or harassment
• It should be made clear to you early in your PhD whom you should report bullying/harassment to. These are likely to include:
• Your supervisor
• Other members of your supervisory team
• Your graduate tutor
• Your head of group and/or department
• Incidences of bullying/harassment between colleagues at different institutions can be harder to address – hence the increasing prevalence of codes of conduct in large consortia and at meetings

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Codes of Conduct

• Many collaborations and meetings (including this one!) now require participants to agree to a code of conduct laying out what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour
• If your project doesn’t have one, don’t be afraid to ask for one!

Authorship

The rules for authorship of a paper are fairly simple: if you’ve worked on the paper you should be on the author list, and if you haven’t worked on the paper you shouldn’t.

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As stated by the IAU Code of Conduct:

• Anyone (and only those) who has made contributions to a work intended for publication, including the inception, design, execution or interpretation of the research, should be offered the opportunity to be a co-author.
• Authors are responsible for providing timely corrections or retractions if errors that could be misleading are found in published works, with the corresponding author bearing primary responsibility.
• Every co-author has both an obligation and a right to review a manuscript before its submission; it is the responsibility of the corresponding author to ensure this opportunity.
• Proper acknowledgement should also be given to individuals who have made minor contributions to a study. 

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Large consortia can have complex authorship policies: your supervisor should help you to navigate these if necessary.

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Authorship

Most of us will not be in the running for a Nobel Prize during our careers, never mind our PhDs – but your supervisor does need to be ensuring that you have the opportunity to lead papers. Paper authorship is probably the most decisive factor when applying for postdocs, so you should be building a publication record

Plagiarism & Referencing

• Plagiarism and self-plagiarism are acts of reproducing text, ideas or other material from sources without proper credit, whether it is inserted verbatim or has been modified or paraphrased

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• Authors have an obligation to include a set of references for the precedents, sources and context of the reported work
• Data provided by others must be cited appropriately
• Data obtained from public databases should be cited in accordance with the guidelines and recommendations of the source from which they were obtained

https://www.iau.org/Iau/Iau/About/Statutes---Rules/Code-of-Conduct.aspx

Peer review

• Peer review should provide a thorough, fair, respectful, timely and objective evaluation of the work under consideration
• Reviewers should strive to be aware of unconscious bias
• Peer review is strictly confidential: materials provided for review must not be used or disclosed by reviewers, and discussions amongst reviewers must not be shared
• It is unethical to seek to gain advantage through peer review, either through use of private information, or through biased reviews

https://www.iau.org/Iau/Iau/About/Statutes---Rules/Code-of-Conduct.aspx

Open Access publishing

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• Traditional publishing: universities pay journals for access to their articles

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• There are many obvious problems with this! Most notably: no public access to publicly-funded research

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• All STFC-funded research must now be published in open access articles. All research going into future REFs will also need to be open access.

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• Open access charges: most (all?) UK universities have a “Read and Publish” agreement with MNRAS – free open access publishing!

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• Other dedicated open-access journals exist (ApJ is now fully open-access) but usually come with substantial publishing charges

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• Software can be published in dedicated journals, e.g. The Journal of Open Source Software

Predatory journals

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• “Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.”

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• Usually fairly easy to spot, but be careful!

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• There’s a significant cost in money and reputation to publishing in these journals

As a rule of thumb: is it listed on ADS?

AI and LLMs

ChatGPT prompt: an image of an astronomer experiencing a moral dilemma

• Use of LLMs for peer review is very bad practice, and usually explicitly banned by peer review panels – if you’ve agreed to read someone’s work, do them the courtesy of actually reading it!

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• Use of LLMs for writing papers usually helps no one: the writing process is usually where you explain your ideas to yourself

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• Bear in mind that LLMs are inherently remixing other people’s writing – which is plagiarism. (And note that they’re more than capable of hallucinating citations!)

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• Use of LLMs to improve spelling/grammar – frankly, why not?

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• LLMs for coding: OK, but make sure that you know what your code is actually doing!

Talk to your supervisor about LLMs sooner rather than later!

Land rights

Figure credits: Big Island Now, 3CR Community Radio

• Telescopes are often build on colonised land, and indigenous communities often benefit little from telescopes built on their land

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• This is exacerbated significantly if observatories are built on sacred land

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• Major tensions can exist between observatories and local communities

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• The extent to which those tensions are either expressed or acknowledged varies

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• There can be significant misinformation around astronomical construction projects

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• While some sites have more complicated histories and ongoing problems than others, this issue is not easily avoidable in ground-based astronomy

Qoricancha Sun Temple, Cusco

Leilehua Yuen

Barnaby Norris and Ray Norris 

Site acknowledgements

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e.g.:

The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community.  We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

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Please use these if your observatory asks you to – it’s quite literally the least we can do

The Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority

• A new organization set up to manage Mauna Kea, with representatives from the Native Hawaiian community, astronomy community, and other local representatives
• Formed in 2022, and will take over management of Mauna Kea in 2028

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• Things do get better!

New facilities can (and should!) do better from the outset

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A current example of a new major observatory building strong community links and engagement is the Square Kilometre Array.

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If you are concerned about or want to get involved with community engagement efforts at the telescope you’re working with, the best thing to do is to talk to observatory staff!

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Environmental Considerations:�(1) Conference (and Other) Travel

Conference travel has an environmental impact:

• EWASS 2019: 1855 tCO₂e
• EWASS 2020: 0.6 tCO₂e

(Burtscher et al. 2020)

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• In-person conference attendance is an important means of disseminating your results, and crucial to developing your collaborative network
• Travel can be made more efficient: if you’re travelling for a conference, can you make a research visit at the same time?
• Choose lower-carbon travel where possible: many universities let you use more expensive modes of transport if they’re lower-carbon

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Burtscher et al. 2020

Environmental Considerations�(2) High-Performance Computing

• The energy required to run large simulations is non-negligible
• Optimise your code where possible, and use appropriate programming languages for your problem
• Find out whether the machines that you are using are powered by renewable electricity – most universities are moving towards this

Portegies Zwart 2020

Environmental Considerations�(3) Astronomical facilities

Knödlseder et al. 2020

ESO La Silla

• APEX now gets 40% of its energy from solar power

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• The ELT aims to be solar powered

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• The planned AtLAST telescope is aiming for net zero in both construction and operations

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• Again, things do get better!

Environmental Considerations�3) Astronomical facilities

And finally…�The time the JCMT was stolen by pirates!

https://www.eaobservatory.org/jcmt/public/jcmt/history/