SARI Program Plan

Department of Geosciences

College of Earth and Mineral Sciences

Part 1: CITI online RCR training program:

A) Students will be made aware of the requirement through new-student orientation (offered each fall, the week before the start of the fall semester), and it will be included in our graduate student handbook, which is available to students on the web and in paper.

B) All M.S. and Ph.D. students will be expected to complete the requirement by the end of their first year of graduate studies.

C) Students will notify the graduate program office of their completion in the on-line CITI program by providing a printed copy of the completion certificate. All first year students are required to take Geosc 500, so completion of this course will be documented by student transcripts submitted with each student’s annual progress report (it is an existing departmental requirement that all students turn in a progress report and meet with their committee annually). In addition, the form for reporting annual progress will be modified to include specifics for reporting information about completion of the discussion-based training within research groups affirmed by faculty signature.

Part 2: Five hours of discussion-based RCR education:

Discussion-based RCR education will take place in three steps:

A one-hour discussion during new-student orientation.

1) A two-hour discussion during Geosc 500, a course required of all graduate students in Geosciences.

2) A two-hour discussion to be offered through specialized research groups within the department. These might include the paleobiology group, the astrobiology group, the ice and climate group, AfricaArray students, etc.

RCR topics to be discussed will be organized as follows:

1) During new-student orientation, discussion will focus on acquisition, management, sharing, and ownership of data and mentor/trainee responsibilities

2) During the Geosc 500, discussion will focus on: publication practices and responsible authorship, conflict of interest and commitment, research misconduct and peer review

3) During research group discussions, the topics will include: sub-discipline related concerns in data acquisition, management, sharing, for example such as the different nuances of reporting of lab or field data. It will also cover collaborative science and interdisciplinary concerns as appropriate.

Discussion will be facilitated by faculty instructors, who will be aided by readings that highlight case studies and materials on RCR provided by the graduate program office (drawn, for example, from teaching tools available through the Rock Institute website). We request that all faculty members have access to the content of the on-line module to facilitate complementary coverage of topics.