Why should prevention of power abuse and supervision conflicts be considered as a matter of good scientific practice? The application of good scientific practice aims to ensure that science is, without exception pursued in accordance with the highest standards of the respective scientific field.  Thereby a sustainable evolution of the science ecosystem should be achieved and its credibility and reputation in society maintained.

Can ethics in science be global and why is this topic relevant currently? One of the main recurrent debates in the Global Ethics research team (GEST) has been whether ethics can be at all “global”. My opinion is that not only it could but it should. Notwithstanding the significant differences that we easily witness in cultural, social norms and behaviour, we are faced with a strongly interconnected and interdependent world.

In September you are organizing the conference “Divergent values in sustainability assessments: love them, leave them, or change them?”. A core theme of the conference is “ethics in scientific policy advice”. Why do you think the topic of ethics in scientific policy advice is important now? Martin Kowarsch, expert on Scientific Assessments, Ethics and Public Policy Scientific expertise is important for informing politics about

Why do we need scientific advice for cities based on urban research? Why is it not only a local, but also a global matter? Scientific advice for cities cannot be seen as a local issue, particularly because sustainable development is a global matter itself and needs a common approach.

Global rankings have decisively shifted the nature of the conversation around higher education to  emphasise universities’ performance in knowledge economies. How did that happen and why are rankings becoming increasingly important? The emergence of global rankings coincided with the acceleration of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. This is because higher education is a global game.

The scientific community in some African countries is seeking for closer ties to the Western European and North American communities.

You initiated the #DontLeaveItToGoogle campaign after Google brought out a search engine for scientific datasets. What was the reason to start such an initiative? Research data is an important scientific output and there are many benefits to research data sharing, including data reuse and aggregation. But discovery is a big problem, even bigger than in literature.

German universities and research institutions are playing a prominent role in the global trend of shifting academic publishing to open access. A nationwide consortium of scientific institutions, known as DEAL, aims to encourage academic publishers to adopt new licensing agreements for open access publication of scholarly content.

[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”] What are from a media ethics perspective the biggest challenges for science in the digital age? One of the biggest challenges in science communication is to create trust.

How do you define “good scientific practices”? ORI’s statute and regulations do not define “good scientific practices,” but ORI recognizes that every scientific discipline should have standards for how it defines good scientific practices.  We see many instances of poor record-keeping and documentation of experiments, as well as sloppy data handling.