Unit for Innovation and Research in Engineering

UnIRE will be a research unit to be installed at ISEL; thus, as far as ethics issues are concerned it will be supported by the Ethics Committee created by Dispatch No. 52/P/2021, of May 7th, from the President of ISEL. Its activity is supported by the Regulation published through the Dispatch n.º 9039/2021 published in the Republic Diary, 2nd series, n.º 177, of September 10th, 2021.  ISEL's Ethics Committee's mission is to promote ethical standards that must be respected in the exercise of the activity to be carried out, to promote reflection, and to contribute to the definition of appropriate guidelines for the establishment and consolidation of a policy to safeguard ethical and deontological principles, namely in the areas of scientific research, teaching and interaction with society.

However, the researchers working within the UnIRE will also be subject to the following rules of conduct:

1. Research activities must be planned and conducted based on research questions/problems that allow adding relevant knowledge on a given topic or developing new methods/instruments with potential for application;

2. The relevance of research can also be justified in situations of proven pedagogical-educational value for training and instructing students, researchers, or other stakeholders, even if achieving an original contribution on a given topic is not the main focus of the research activities;

3. Research that does not present any original contribution to the advancement of knowledge or the empowerment of individuals and communities is not considered ethical, insofar as it constitutes a waste of resources and devalues the contribution of participants;

4. Research carried out through studies without validity and with serious methodological flaws is also not considered ethical. In addition to wasting resources and devaluing the contribution of participants, it can result in erroneous data and results, and its dissemination may have potentially harmful implications;

5. Research data must be made available to anyone who intends to replicate the study or work on the results, subject to any limitations imposed by specific legislation and by the general principles of confidentiality, protection, and security of participants;

6. Researchers must publish and disseminate the results of their research work in an honest, transparent, and rigorous manner;

7. The results must be published as soon as possible, fulfilling the original contribution to which the research is made, except for commercial or intellectual issues that may justify the delay in publication, for example, concerning patent applications;

8. Authorship must be defined taking into account original and significant participation in the research, namely: significant contribution to the research design, data collection and analysis, interpretation of results, discussion, writing and/or revision of the manuscript;

9. When defining authorship, any factors that do not relate to direct and significant participation in research activities should be considered irrelevant, such as: academic or professional status, title or hierarchical position, general supervision of a research group without specific contributions to the project, provision of research space or equipment, funding or financial compensation, text editing, or any other similar ones;

10. The work and collaboration of actors who do not meet the authorship criteria must be recognized whenever justified, and if this is consented by the actors themselves, in a footnote or specific sections for the purpose (e.g. acknowledgments);

11. Any financial and material support for research and publication must be correctly mentioned and acknowledged;

12. All authors must disclose the existence of potential conflicts of interest (e.g., having a financial or affiliative interest concerning the research results);

13. All authors must be fully responsible for the contents of the publications, unless it is specified that their responsibility is limited to a specific part of the study and publication;

14. The order of authorship must be agreed upon by all, right at the beginning of the project or manuscript preparation, without prejudice to subsequent redefinition when justified;

15. The first author should be considered the one who contributed most to the research activities (generally considering the research design, data collection and analysis, interpretation of the results and discussion) and who assumes the main responsibility for writing the manuscript;

16. In the case of publications that are substantially based on a thesis or dissertation content, it must be assumed that the students are the ones who contributed the most to the respective research activities, and that they assumed responsibility for writing the publication. In this sense, they should be listed as first authors in accordance with the previous paragraphs, except in exceptional circumstances;

17. All stakeholders with responsibilities for planning, managing, conducting, or disseminating science must recognize that there are practices that should be qualified as research misconduct;

18. Recognizing these practices, they must also repudiate them, as they promote a deliberately false representation of reality, go against the fundamental principles of the scientific process, and compromise the contributions made by research as a whole;

19. The most egregious practices that should qualify as research misconduct include: data fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism;

20. Data fabrication consists of creating false data (e.g. responses from participants; observational records) or other research materials (e.g. informed consent);

21. Falsification consists of distorting, manipulating, omitting or altering research data, results or materials;

22. Plagiarism is improperly using or appropriating ideas, processes, intellectual property, or other work without proper credit or reference to source or original authorship.