Responsible Conduct of Research: Integrity in Academic Publishing (Online)

Click here to go to the website of Integrity.

In this course you will learn how to tackle authorship issues in your research project and the skills necessary for an honest review. For most PhD candidates who will compose a thesis out of published articles, co-authorship can be a real and challenging issue to deal with. Sometimes, it is already decided beforehand who the author of articles to be published in a specified journal will be, but it may also be open for discussion. Participants will be stimulated to take initiative in authorship discussions and devise a strategy on how to deal with possible dilemmas that could arise.

The course also offers practical assignments in which participants will review each other within the course environment. A scrupulous and honest review takes time and sometimes the decision to accept an invitation to review an article of an international colleague can be problematic in itself.

Being reviewed might also raise issues, for example when extra data is requested that you would like included in another publication. Together with an international group of PhD students, you will engage in meaningful discussions and develop insights that can help you on your route to becoming a responsible researcher.

At the end of the course, participants:

• Explain how responsible conduct of research is relevant to academic publication.
• Determine authorship order, acknowledgements and conflict of interests, when preparing manuscripts.
• Recognize and discuss dilemmas in decisions on authorship and peer review that may arise in their own research project.
• Motivated to communicate about integrity issues with relevant persons.

Participants will be enrolled in an online course via the virtual learning environment of Elevate Health. The course offers both individual and collaborative assignments on research integrity to an interdisciplinary and international group of PhDs. It features many examples and dilemmas faced in academic publication. Students will be enrolled from various European Universities and disciplines. You can either be a starting PhD candidate or an advanced PhD candidate.

Start: May 24, 2021

Duration: Three weeks

Course Load: Approximately 3 hours per week

Certificate: On finishing the course, participants receive a certificate

This course is a pilot within the H2020INTEGRITY project (Grant Agreement No 824586) Erasmus+ project INTEGRITY. To further improve the course, participants will be asked to volunteer in a pre-post survey and/or interview.