Responsible Conduct of Research

Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) involves shared responsibility for the responsible conduct of research among the institutional administration, the research oversight committees and the researchers.

Responsible conduct of research (RCR) includes:

  1. Conflict of interest – personal, professional, and financial – and conflict of commitment, in allocating time, effort, or other research resources
  2. Policies regarding human subjects, live vertebrate animal subjects in research, and safe laboratory practices
  3. Mentor/mentee responsibilities and relationships
  4. Safe research environments (e.g., those that promote inclusion and are free of sexual, racial, ethnic, disability and other forms of discriminatory harassment)
  5. Collaborative research, including collaborations with industry and investigators and institutions in other countries
  6. Peer review, including the responsibility for maintaining confidentiality and security in peer review
  7. Data acquisition and analysis; laboratory tools (e.g., tools for analyzing data and creating or working with digital images); recordkeeping practices, including methods such as electronic laboratory notebooks
  8. Secure and ethical data use; data confidentiality, management, sharing, and ownership
  9. Research misconduct and policies for handling misconduct
  10. Responsible authorship and publication
  11. The scientist as a responsible member of society, contemporary ethical issues in biomedical research, and the environmental and societal impacts of scientific research

Training

The UNCG Office of Research Integrity (ORI) offers an multi-part educational curriculum in the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) to meet the regulatory requirements of both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Both online and in-person educational opportunities are offered. NIH does not accept online training alone. In order to meet NIH policy requirements, a combination of both the in-person and the online training option will need to be completed. For NSF funded studies, the online CITI training is acceptable. All members of the study team must complete their first round of training within a year of the awarded grant and/or before work begins.

Click here for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Training options information.

Federal Regulations