The Ministry of Science and Technology has established rules to ensure that academic ethics are followed by all participants enrolled in its subsidy program, including a requirement that first-time participants complete a six-hour course on academic ethics.
The rule is to apply to all researchers enrolled in the program starting in December, and leaders of projects funded by the program will be required to sign a statement acknowledging they will comply with academic ethics, the ministry said on Friday.
The ministry said it would improve supervision of project participants and recall, in part or in full, any subsidies or rewards issued to researchers who have been suspended over ethics breaches.
The ministry said that it held several meetings with the Ministry of Education and experts focusing on ways to improve self-governance, accountability for research projects, responsibility of supervisory agencies and intergovernmental collaborations to ensure that program participants obey rules.
To ensure accountability, applicants will be mandated to formulate “self-governance regulations on academic ethics,” designate or form a supervisory body, create a mechanism for ethics education and establish standard operating procedures for handling incidents involving possible violations of ethics by the end of the year, the science ministry said, adding that applicants who fail to meet any one of the four requirements will be rejected.
The science ministry urged participants to abide by its statement.
It said it would revise its rules governing research grants by introducing measures to uphold ethics, thereby ensuring that researchers use subsidies appropriately.
The education ministry said it will avoid using the number of research papers published by universities as a major criterion when evaluating universities, promoting professors and distributing subsidies.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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