The Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) program offers education, guidance, and training resources to encourage best practices and promote research integrity at UVA. RCR promotes established professional norms and ethical principles in the performance of all activities related to research. The Director of Research Integrity and Ethics in the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) administers the RCR Program.
As described in UVA’s RCR Training Plan, OVPR works with research leaders across campus to ensure the availability of RCR training and coordinate various offerings to help UVA researchers meet training requirements. RCR compliance is an important term and condition for certain grants and is strongly encouraged for all students and faculty or staff involved in research.
Projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) have specific requirements regarding training in RCR (see the summary with embedded links to agency requirements below). Failure to comply with RCR requirements can be a violation of the terms and conditions of an award.
Federal Agency | Minimal Requirement for RCR | Who must complete the training |
|---|---|---|
| NIH | At least 8 contact hours of training (RCR training should involve face-to-face interactions and discussion-based coursework, while online training can be a component of the overall training) | Trainees, Fellows, Postdoctoral Scholars, Graduate Students, Undergraduate Students |
| NSF | CITI RCR training (online option) or discussion-based coursework with minimum content requirement | All Faculty and Senior Personnel (i.e., principal investigators, co-investigators, and other academic appointees), Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars |
| NIFA | CITI RCR training (online option) or discussion-based coursework with minimum content requirement | Program Directors, Faculty, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students, Postdoctoral Scholars, any staff participating in the project |
Common areas of RCR instruction include:
- Conflict of interest - personal, professional, and financial - and conflict of commitment, in allocating time, effort, or other research resources
- Policies regarding human subjects, live vertebrate animal subjects in research, and safe laboratory practices
- Mentor/mentee responsibilities and relationships
- Safe research environments (e.g., those that promote inclusion and are free of sexual, racial, ethnic, disability and other forms of discriminatory harassment)
- Collaborative research including collaborations with industry investigators and institutions in other countries
- Peer review, including the responsibility for maintaining confidentiality and security in peer review
- Data acquisition and analysis; laboratory tools (e.g., tools for analyzing data and creating or working with digital images); record keeping practices, including methods such as electronic laboratory notebooks
- Secure and ethical data use; data confidentiality, management, sharing, and ownership • Research misconduct and policies for handling misconduct
- Responsible authorship and publication
- The scientist as a responsible member of society, contemporary ethical issues in biomedical research, and the environmental and societal impacts of scientific research
Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative
To facilitate training and compliance, the University subscribes to the online Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) Program as an RCR training resource available to anyone affiliated with UVA. The training materials may serve as supplemental training resources or, when appropriate to the situation and population being trained, as the designated platform for the full RCR course. Learners select the course that most closely aligns with their research focus.
For more information on using CITI to complete RCR requirements, visit our training page.