The National Professional and Research Ethics Portal is an online resource center for ethics in science, mathematics, and engineering. It will be developed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its partners Howard University, the National Academy of Engineering, and Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R). Academics and professionals at many other organizations will participate in the National Ethics Portal project through agreements to deposit materials and through multidisciplinary advisory committees and online communities.
The National Professional and Research Ethics Portal will provide access to information and expertise for instructors who teach ethics, students with questions about research integrity, researchers and engineers who encounter ethical challenges in practice, administrators in universities and businesses who oversee ethics and compliance policies, scholars who conduct research on professional and research ethics, and others with questions or interests in these areas. It will incorporate existing resources and a wide range of new, peer-reviewed materials to be developed by the proposal team and other scholars, from instructional modules for learners to white papers that summarize research and best practices in teaching ethics and maintaining ethics programs. The National Portal will provide comprehensive access to the research literature and other materials through sophisticated, user-friendly federated search functions and will host discussions among communities of interest. It will be sustainable, fully accessible, and will provide for digital preservation: the University of Illinois Library has committed to including the materials in its permanent collection.
This project leverages existing NSF investments in the HUBZero computer platform as well as the strengths of the host institution and a unique national team of collaborators. This resource center is designed to foster a broad conversation about professional and research ethics across a range of disciplines and settings and to provide support resources for those studying, conveying and practicing research and professional ethics.
Per NSF's implementation of Section 7009 of the America COMPETES Act, the Foundation committed to supporting the development of an online resource center that will contain research findings, pedagogical materials, and promising practices regarding the ethical and responsible conduct of research in engineering, mathematics, and science.
