Why is RCR a good idea?
As stated in the NSF Federal Register Notice regarding RCR, “The responsible and ethical conduct of research is critical for excellence, as well as public trust, in science in engineering.” According to a report by the National Postdoc Association, “Despite recent moves at the federal level towards requiring training in RCR [1], many postdocs still do not receive guidance on these issues. Sigma Xi’s 2005 nationwide survey of postdocs found that nearly a third (31%) of respondents indicated having received no training in research ethics, with another third (33%) having received only informal, ‘on-the-job’ training. In the specific areas of intellectual property and conflict resolution skills, however, they found that almost two-thirds had received no training [2].
