OSI’s Charter for Research Integrity

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 1) Training of Participants

  1. Participants will be trained in the scientific approach: developing research questions, creating protocols, writing results and perspectives, and all processes necessary for their mission.
  2. All stays can be recognized as an internship for a student, with the agreement of the scientific educator and the program manager.
  3. During a participatory stay, the participant is invited to share their specific knowledge with teammates to further enrich the research project.

 2) Data Collection

Data collection must:

  1. Comply with the laws of the study country and international laws.
  2. Respect the local culture, its beliefs, and customs.
  3. Promote, when available, methods that do not harm the integrity of the study subject (wildlife, flora, landscape...).
  4. The study should be conducted with minimal impact on the field and must comply with the ethical charter for observing wildlife (see environmental charter).

 3) Data Rights and Sharing:

All collected data are open data under Creative Commons license. By default, they will be published under a CC license (“Attribution + Non-Commercial Use + No Derivatives + Share Alike”). However, each program manager may decide to publish certain data under a more permissive CC license (allowing modifications, for example).
Participants who contributed to the data collection must always be credited and acknowledged.

  1. Participants, mentors, partners, or any other individuals participating in an OSI stay agree that the collected data can be used and published as open data for scientific purposes by the NGO’s research programs or any other institutional research organization.
  2. Data and knowledge sharing can be done:
  • with student interns
  • with other entities, NGOs, researchers, etc.
  • on participatory databases (e.g., observation.org for biodiversity)

 4) Publication of Results

The publication of results is always carried out after validation by the responsible manager of the relevant scientific program within the NGO.
It can be done:

  1. On the websites of each of the NGO’s research programs
  2. In journals and/or on science outreach websites
  3. On participatory platforms like PrePrint (e.g., BioRxiv.org and ResearchGate)
  4. In scientific journals with an impact factor

 5) Relationship with Public or Private Partner Laboratories

  1. Without a more restrictive contract, institutional partners participating in an OSI participatory project outside their official positions retain their independence.
  2. The NGO commits not to file for patents (see Creative Commons license)

 6) Management and Communication of Research Projects

  1. The NGO commits to publicly presenting all its research projects and their progress at least twice a year, during the Geneva Forum and the strategic committees of each research project.
  2. Research programs, through their managers, commit to considering feedback from colleagues, partners, participants, and the scientific community during their evaluations and planning.
  3. Research program managers commit to publishing their scientific reports at a minimum on their website, and possibly in scientific journals in collaboration with relevant partners, in addition to their activity reports.
  4. In cases involving data on sensitive species, scientific reports may not be posted online and will only be sent upon request (with a note about the availability of such reports on the website).

 7) Research Project Ethics

  1. Research projects aim to increase knowledge while respecting living and non-living entities, in line with the 17 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) defined by the UN.
  2. The objectives of the projects are apolitical, secular, and non-dogmatic.
  3. The OSI NGO commits to verifying and respecting the ethics of research projects through internal and peer review, which occurs once a year during the strategic committees of each NGO program.

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