Executive Summary
The University’s mission is to discover and understand, to play a leading role in undertaking R&I that addresses the challenges facing our world, nation, region and city. Delivering excellent R&I requires intellect and integrity, and the University aspires, at all times, to live up to the highest standards of research integrity.
The GRIP Policy applies to all R&I activities undertaken by the University’s staff and students wherever they take place, and also applies to all individuals who are not members of the University but who undertake R&I activities in University premises. Whilst outputs from innovation activities differ from research outputs the fundamental principles in the GRIP Policy apply to both R and I activities.
The GRIP Policy has three fundamental principles:
1. The reputation, value and public benefit of the University’s R&I depends on its integrity.
2. The University trusts its staff and students to practise R&I with integrity and actively seeks to sustain a research environment that fosters integrity in R&I.
3. Deliberate, dangerous or negligent deviations from good R&I practices are a violation of the GRIP Policy; as such they are breaches of the University’s employment terms and conditions and the Student Discipline Regulations.
It is critical that good R&I principles and practices are observed and seen to be observed. All individual researchers are accountable to a number of stakeholders for how they undertake R&I activities and how they behave towards people involved in and/or affected by the R&I activity. The individual researcher is primarily responsible for upholding good R&I principles and practices when undertaking R&I activities and interacting with others involved in and/or affected by the R&I activity. Supervisors of postgraduate research students and academics responsible for research staff are expected to be role models of good practice and professionalism.
The following issues should be considered from the beginning, and throughout the project:
- recognising that R&I projects cannot always be planned in detail from the outset, an outline plan, which may include a data management plan, should be drawn up to describe the project’s operational process and timetable.
- where appropriate, the project’s approach to public engagement and creating public benefit should be explicit;
- potential or real conflicts of interest should be declared and, where necessary, managed;
- potential risks to reputation should be identified, and steps taken to manage and minimise them (the reputation of the University, the Faculty, the Department and the individual researcher for financial probity, integrity, honesty, professionalism)
- for collaborative R&I, an early agreement should be put in place about researchers’ roles and responsibilities, and the nature and manner for communications between all involved. An agreement provides an objective process for clarifying what researchers can expect from each other including who does what and the timescales for activities;
- for collaborative R&I, transparent criteria for apportioning authorship, acknowledgements and intellectual property rights (IP rights) should be agreed as early as practical (Research Councils UK requires collaborative agreements to be drawn up);
- for collaborative R&I, the publication strategy should be explicit and agreed by all involved;
- where applicable, risks to people and/or animals and/or the environment and/or to cultural objects should be identified wherever possible, and steps taken to manage and minimise risks;
- all of the above should be transparent and explicit, and should ideally be available to new staff at the time of their recruitment.