Our Research, Our Responsibilities

We hold all members of our research community to the highest possible ethical and professional standards. Many of our research projects receive public funding. Researchers must follow the accountability standards laid out by each funding body in addition to our own policies and procedures.

Panel on Responsible Conduct of Research

The Panel on Responsible Conduct of Research within the Tri-Agency Framework: Responsible Conduct of Research outlines the responsibility of researchers working in Canada. The panel ensures a uniform approach for promoting the responsible conduct of research.

Three federal agencies compose the Tri-Agency:

Tri-Agency Framework

We follow the Tri-Agency Framework’s guidelines (Section 4), and commit to fostering and maintaining an environment that:

Supports and promotes the responsible conduct of research.
Sets out responsibilities and corresponding policies for researchers, institutions, and funding bodies.

This includes the policies and requirements related to:

Applying for and managing funds.
Performing research.
Disseminating results and the processes followed if an alleged breach of an agency policy occurs.

We invite you to review the framework in its entirety and to contact us with any questions.

Ported research is made freely accessible within 12 months of publication.

For CIHR research funding:

This policy applies to all grants awarded on January 1, 2008, and onward.

For NSERC or SSHRC funding:

This policy applies to all grants awarded May 1, 2015, and onward.

How can researchers adhere to the policy?

Tri-Agency grant recipients can fulfill the requirements of the policy through one of the following actions:

Depositing their final, peer-reviewed manuscript into an institutional or disciplinary online repository that will ensure the manuscript is freely accessible within 12 months of publication (must be allowed by the journal).
Publication in a journal that offers immediate open access or that offers open access on its website within 12 months.

Note: Some journals require authors to pay article processing charges (which can range from $3,000 to $5,000) to make manuscripts freely available upon publication. These publishing costs are eligible to expense under the Use of Grant Funds. We recommend that you budget for this cost in your grant applications.

What resources are available at the university?

The Campus Library supports open access by encouraging faculty to deposit the results of their research in e-scholar, the university’s institutional repository. E-scholar is an open-access repository where faculty and students can upload and preserve their research. Researchers published in the journal of their choosing, then deposit a copy of their final, peer-reviewed manuscript in the institutional repository. For more information, see instructions for depositing work in e-scholar.

Researchers may also deposit copies of their work in disciplinary repositories. For a comprehensive list of disciplinary repositories, please see OpenDOAR.

To look up publisher policies around paid open-access and archiving in institutional and disciplinary repositories, use SHERPA/RoMEO.

Should faculty choose to publish their work in an open-access journal, please note that the Library does not pay for or subsidize article-processing charges for open-access publications.

For further information, please visit the Library’s Open Access Guide, or email library@dc-ot.ca.