The IGDORE Global Board is expecting increased interest in applying for an IGDORE affiliation. The purpose of this thread is to consolidate and contextualize the application details that are available on the IGDORE website, and then to publicly a public forum for answering questions about this. IGDORE tries to be as transparent as possible about what we require from affiliates, but as with all institutions, there are inevitably some implicit norms (i.e. ‘unwritten rules’) that aren’t always obvious to outsiders; we hope that this document will make IGDORE’s norms easier to understand for applicants who are used to how things work at other institutions. Applications for affiliation at IGDORE are made using this form.
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IGDORE’s institutional values are openness, replicability, healthy, and global. IGDORE aims to promote and enable high-quality research, and also support researchers to have a healthy working environment and a good quality of life.
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What IGDORE requires from affiliates:
- You need to accept and adhere to our Code of Research Conduct [CoRC],
The Global Board extensively revised the IGDORE CoRC in mid-2022. The CoRC was adapted from the Code of Scientific Conduct used at the Eindhoven University of Technology (Tu/e), and emphases five principles of research integrity: Trustworthiness, Intellectual Honesty, Openness, Independence and Societal Responsibility. While the IGDORE CoRC is progressive, we think that the requirements of the CoRC are generally inline with what most academics consider good research integrity practices (see e.g. Office of Research Integrity) and that compliance will not place an undue burden on any researcher. Additionally, the CoRC emphasises IGDORE’s strong institutional commitment to open and replicable research practices.
The points in the CoRC are divided into required and expected parts. If you plan to apply for affiliation with IGDORE, please be sure that you can and will be able to abide by the points in the required part (we would rather not have to do this again), and at least aspire to comply with the points in the expected part. There are two points in the required part of the CoRC that some applicants may not be familiar with (although the first is now a common requirement for research funding):
- make their research articles openly available;
This means that we want all IGDORE affiliates to make their publications openly accessible. This does not mean they have to be published as open-access articles (which often incurs an article processing charge), posting a preprint or postprint in an open-access repository (green-open access) is also acceptable. However, we do not consider posting to Research Gate or academia.edu to be sufficient (see here).
- upon request, promptly provide data and other information needed for independent verification of any publication in which they are included as authors;
This means that we want IGDORE affiliate to proactively support reasonable requests to access data from their publications. We are aware that every author does not always have access to (and may not have even seen) all the data used in a paper, but we will still require IGDORE authors to provide assistance with obtaining the requested data from their co-author(s). If you would rather not respond to requests for data, then we suggest sharing your research data and materials in a data repository at the time of publication, so that such requests are unnecessary.
The How to live up to the CoRC? guide provides advice on how to comply with the required points in the CoRC, and IGDORE staff can provide additional support (particularly about openness and replicability) when needed.
An implicit point in the CoRC is that it applies to research which the broader academic community considers legitimate, and excludes pseudoscience. IGDORE will not support work on pseudoscientific topics, even if it does not explicitly conflict with any of the points in the CoRC.
- you need to make your affiliation with IGDORE explicit in all relevant professional contexts (e.g., publications).
Basically, we require IGDORE affiliates to use their affiliation on all their publications. Using IGDORE as a secondary affiliation is fine if you already have another affiliation, such as a university employer. We also encourage affiliates to indicate their affiliation on personal pages, particularly in the employment section of their ORCiD profile.
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Responses to the questions on the application form will be used, along with your online profiles (particularly Google Scholar and ORCiD) and research outputs, for assessing your application.
In order to join IGDORE, you need to show proof of commitment to our Code of Research Conduct. Please provide examples from your research activity to support this here.
We require an applicant’s history of research outputs to show proof that they are committed to open and replicable research practices. It should be clear that they can and will abide by the IGDORE CoRC in all of the research they will do with an IGDORE affiliation. Note that this does not mean that applicants are expected to have complied with the IGDORE CoRC through their entire research career (e.g. it’s OK if articles published when you were a student were not open-access), but we need to see that you have at least started to demonstrate a tangible commitment to these practices. Some advice on how to do so is available here. Absent anything else, posting post-prints of your closed-access papers to an appropriate repository is a good-enough way to show your commitment to open research.
It is generally easy for us to find your publications, but it is often harder for us to find other open research outputs, such as: data, code, research materials, educational materials, peer reviews, preregistrations, etc. Including links will be helpful if you want to be sure that we consider these materials when processing your application. You don’t need to link to every open research output you have ever produced, links to a few recent examples (or profiles on individual repositories, such as your GitHub account) will be fine. However, a link to your Research Gate or academia.edu profile is not a good way of showing that you publish open access (again, see here).
While we are seeking evidence that you can and will abide by the CoRC, we are also keeping an eye out for signs that you might not actually do so. We will pick a few of articles from your profiles to look over, and we are getting pretty good at spotting signs of problematic research behaviour. Publications in predatory looking journals are a red flag. Very high research productivity, particularly many single author papers, may lead us to check through your work in more detail. We are likely to identify cut-and-paste plagiarism of text and images (we learnt our lesson). We might look through the reference list of recent publications for non-existent articles, authors, or journals (IGDORE does not have a policy on the use of generative AI, but hallucinated references are a clear sign that things are not OK). We will look into publications on viXra.org. If we think you might be publishing pseudoscience, then we will ask a domain expert from our network to look over some of your articles and give an opinion.
An implicit point is that applicants need to have some tangible research outputs when they apply to join IGDORE. Unfortunately, IGDORE does not currently provide research training, and we expect new affiliates to come to IGDORE with sufficient skills to independently conduct research that complies with the CoRC. Such skills are usually obtained through research focused graduate study (e.g. a PhD or research Masters program), but they can also be obtained in other ways, such as working in a research environment. Regardless of how you obtained your research skills, we will use your research outputs (rather than credentials) as the primary way of assessing whether you are cable of conducting research that abides by the CoRC.
Students: IGDORE does not currently accept applicants from researchers who are enrolled as students at a higher educational institution (we are phasing out the legacy researcher-in-training category). There are two reasons for this. Firstly, such students are not always in a position where they can follow through on a commit to the IGDORE CoRC, as their research practices (e.g. publishing open-access) are typically directed by their supervisor. Secondly, they are unlikely to have the freedom to add IGDORE as an affiliation to their publications. We will consider exceptions for students who are sure they have sufficient control of their research to comply with the CoRC, in which case you should add a note to the application explaining your circumstances. We encourage students who cannot apply for an IGDORE affiliation to engage with the IGDORE community on this forum and apply to IGDORE when they have completed their studies.
Please tell us about your motivation to join IGDORE and what you expect from IGDORE in terms of services and support.
This is not a required field, but telling us about your motivation will usually help your application, particularly if you have only recently begun to follow open research practices, or don’t have many research outputs. If you already have an affiliation with another academic organisation or are employed in a research role outside of academia (e.g. industry, government), describing why you would like IGDORE as a second affiliation will also help.
I hereby confirm that I have read and will adhere to the IGDORE Code of Research Conduct
Checking this box is basically IGDORE’s contract with our affiliates. You have to check this box to submit your application, and if we accept your application, we are going to hold you accountable to following the CoRC in all future research you do with an IGDORE affiliation.
Please select this if you have previously engaged in scientific misconduct and ask to be confidentially interviewed by IGDORE Global Board as part of the review process
We acknowledge that reform is possible for researchers who have previously engaged in misconduct. If looking into your research background is likely to show a series of retractions, publications in predatory journals, or otherwise sketchy looking research, then we encourage you to check this box. So far, no applicant has indicated this; it will probably be interesting when somebody does.
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A note on logistics: we have nearly reached the account capacity with IGDORE’s current email hosting provider and are planning a move to a new provider in the near future. There may be some delay with providing email accounts for applicants who are approved before summer 2024.
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Please feel free to ask any questions about applying to IGDORE, or the institute more broadly, in this thread. This post was written at relatively short-notice, and will be updated if any omissions or unclear points come up in the discussion.