The University of Iowa is obligated to ensure that faculty, staff, and students conducting research are trained in the responsible conduct of research (RCR). Federal and private funding agencies are requiring increased compliance and oversight to ensure that researchers are meeting mandated RCR training. As a premier academic research institution training the country’s future generations of researchers, it is imperative that we instill basic principles of scholarly integrity and ethical approaches to meet the needs of the University’s research mission.

The Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) and the Graduate College ensure that institutional compliance guidelines are met. All graduate students and postdoctoral researchers starting at the University of Iowa after Aug. 1, 2010, MUST complete an approved course of study in the Principles of Scholarly Integrity if their training and/or research is supported by NIH or NSF (e.g., investigator-based grants, individual fellowships, institutional training grants).

All new graduate students in the Department of Chemistry fulfill this requirement by completing the course Ethics in Chemical Sciences (CHEM 5092) during the Spring semester of their second year.  Graduate students enrolled in this course will be trained on scholarly integrity for being a responsible chemist as they embark on graduate research at the University of Iowa. The infrastructure of scientific scholarship is introduced with an emphasis on interacting with peers, funding agencies, and industrial entities. Responsible conduct in research is discussed in the context of creation of knowledge, dissemination of scientific findings, intellectual property, and conflict of interest. Workshops are conducted to study cases in chemical research that illustrate the principles of scholarly integrity.

Additional information about ethics is available from the Graduate College and the ACS.