Abstract

Awareness about the relevance of Research Ethics and professional integrity seems to be gaining importance at Universities and Research Centres. The key question or main hindrance lies however in knowing, thinking and defining what can be the best policies, strategies or instruments in order to try to consolidate it.

The aim of the session is presenting an Ethical Governance approach adapted to research contexts at universities and research centers. This approach is linked to the European Horizon 2020 project Ethna System. This project proposes an ethical governance system based on a series of guides and practice guidelines that have been implemented in 6 different institutions along the last 2 years with the aim of boosting RRI and focusing on integrity, gender, open access and public engagement aspects.

In the first part, we will specifically present in detail the implementation case at Universitat Jaume I. That way, on one hand, the progress of the institutionalisation of RRI through the use of several ethics management instruments as ethics codes, good practices codes and ethics committees will be examined. On the other hand, we aim at delving into the evaluation and analysis of which ones can be the levers that can boost or hinder the promotion of responsible research. In this section, it will be specified the way the combination of an institutional leadership convinced by these matters, the existence of guides and practice guidelines to promote RRI and/or the definition of a participative and transparent process, result in being key elements in the success of the implementation processes. These specific case results (regarding success as much as regarding limitations) may well inspire other implementation processes.
The second part of the presentation of this session will vividly describe quality-oriented guidelines that participants can adopt if they want to learn how to strengthen trust between science and society through stakeholder engagement and jointly address the challenges of our time. Three methodologically structured and informative handbooks, available as open access, invite participants to take up strategies for wide-ranging stakeholder involvement in the ethical governance of RRI activities. The presentation of the guidelines is aimed at a broad audience that does not need to have prior knowledge of RRI to benefit from the do's and don'ts of stakeholder engagement. Session participants will be provided with a useful list of 12 principles and a 6-step guide to identifying, analysing, mapping, prioritising, selecting and recruiting relevant stakeholders. Also, specific methods that can facilitate a two-way dialogue will be illustrated.
Acknowledgments to the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Grant 872360