CSIC’s Ethics Committee has agreed a procedure for dealing with ethical conflicts. Any individual or institution can bring a case to the attention of the Committee, whose field of competence is limited to CSIC and its employees.

First of all, the Secretary of the Committee analyzes whether the Committee is the competent body to address the issue, and provides the Chairman of the Committee and the Subcommittee of Conflicts with her/his recommendation. An agreement on acceptance is reached; if the conflict handling is dismissed, the Secretary, within seven days, will notice it to the informant by email or letter post.

If handling of the conflict is accepted, the Subcommittee of Conflicts will get in touch with selected people related to the case, and specifically interview those directly involved, so that they can give their side of the matter. Furthermore, the Subcommittee can hold private interviews with any other people concerned, as those in charge of human, materials or economic resources management, who could provide relevant additional information.

If applicable, experts or specialized commissions will be appointed to analyze the case and provide advice. Once the procedures are completed and an agreement on the case is reached by the Committee, the decision will be forwarded to the parties concerned. In parallel, it will be raised to the CSIC’s President, accompanied of a recommendation for action by the Institution.

Chart Workflow of dealing of investigations CSIC

Several members of the CSIC Ethics Committee give lectures regarding research integrity and responsible conduct of research. Seven lectures were given last year 2016.

Research Ethics and Research Integrity have been included as topics in the CSIC Management Training Course aimed to CSIC’s Directors and Managers.

The CSIC’s Ethics Committee drafted and promoted the National Statement on Research Integrity. The Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) and the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies were encouraged to share the Statement, which was jointly subscribed, and publically released by the three parties.

The “Procedure for the admission and processing of communications and applications on scientific integrity” (effective as of 15 May 2020) is published in our web page under the section “Operating documents” and it is too long to be included here.
Any person or institution can contact the CIR-CAT either using an official form or sending a message to bustia.circat.reu@gencat.cat.
Up to now, the CIR-CAT has dealt with three petitions, which have already been closed.

Because of the presentation of the CIR-CAT to the Catalan research and university system, we began to receive the codes of conduct, training programmes, etc. of some institutions. We have started to analyse all this documentation in order to produce specific manuals which, after trying a consensus, may eventually be adopted by our system in a near future
Promoting

Once the CIR-CAT has progressed in the elaboration of the above-mentioned manuals, it will be ready to start promoting the research integrity among the members of our system, which have already stated their interest on it.