Scholarly integrity is recognized as an important issue in scientific research and training. Yet there are profound differences in the larger cultural context for ethical decision-making. As international collaborations become more common, these differences need to be confronted. Training in the Responsible Conduct of Research tends to ignore the cross-cultural challenges of ethical decision-making. Instead, RCR instruction has largely been proscriptive, field- and country-specific, and universalizing, based on fundamentally western notions of individual intellectual property rights rather than collaborative values. This project, supported by the Ethics Education in Science and Engineering program at NSF, will put its emphasis upon cultural context and upon partnership with international scholars and diverse community groups in developing a new kind of training in scholarly integrity. It will develop a module for graduate students launching fieldwork projects, collaborative international partnerships or community-based partnerships with diverse populations. The project will itself be a partnership, and will foster discussion of ethical values across international and cultural boundaries. Researchers at Brown University will work together with collaborators at the Indian Institute for Technology and Zhejiang University in China. The final results of this project will include: 1) a research paper discussing the formation of the physical science disciplines of physics, chemistry and engineering, and the impact of that discipline formation on ethic decision-making, 2) a case-study-based curriculum developed in collaboration with our international partners, 3) a research paper on the curriculum design and its assessment module, and 4) a web site dedicated to making these resources available beyond the three campuses where they were developed.
