Common standards to promote effective, responsible and creative science systems

By SalM on July 24, 2020 in News

A newly launched monitoring exercise aims to measure how well national science systems worldwide are doing on topics such as scientific freedom and open science, and the perspectives of researchers and scientific associations are crucial.

In 2017 the General Council of UNESCO adopted a Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers with the aim of setting common standards for the operation and values of effective science systems. A first monitoring exercise for the Recommendation is just getting under way, and gathering the views of scientists and scientific associations on how to achieve the best outcomes for science is a crucial part of the monitoring.

International Science Council spoke to April Tash, who is UNESCO’s lead specialist on the Recommendation, to find out more.

Read the whole interview here.

Dr April Tash is a programme specialist within the Department of Social Sciences at UNESCO. Dr Tash guided the adoption of the revised Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers in 2017, and is the lead for the Recommendation within UNESCO.


Source: International Science Council

Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash

Join RRING Community

By SalM on July 24, 2020 in RRING NEWS

RRING Goals

Research Performing Organisations (RPO), Research Funding Organisations (RFO), Researchers and the industry representatives can be a part of a true community of practice to learn, share and apply. We can all work together as equals to shape the research and innovation ideas and visions.

RRING goals are to establish and cultivate country by country, a true community of practice to learn, share and apply our influence to achieve ever more responsibility and freedom in research and innovation.

This is a reason why we launched the RRING community. Our vision is to establish a welcoming community that stands for mutual learning and collaboration to promote and mobilize for responsibility and freedom in research and innovation in line with the Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers (2017).

Seven Key Guiding Principles of RRING Community for 6 years

RRING will be guided with reference to a global set of norms and standards agreed by 195 governments at UN level in order to capture a common ‘language’ for what has previously been referred to as RRI, and RRING will thus promote this common and global normative content across a variety of applications.

RRING will evolve and grow toward becoming a recognizable global networking community made up of local (or national) chapters, each of which will adopt and must adhere to the mission statement and goals of RRING.

RRING will ever maintain an ambitious social mobilization and behavioural change agenda for embedding certain norms of research (responsibility and others found in the RSSR) in practices everywhere, which may include working with public authorities at any level (local, national, regional or international) and also stands for high-quality research in line with RRING’s vision. Communicating is the action at the heart of actions to mobilize and promote and will be guided by the RRING Communications Strategy.

Community and learning actions will be the initial focus, until the chapter will define and agree by a vote of more than 2/3 of its members to its first activities plan. Each chapter will be routinely and regularly invited to contribute its advice and views, either as a chapter or by individual members, to assessments of norms and standards of the RSSR.

Aside from their input to the assessments, RRING collaboration and advocacy actions will consist exclusively of clearly defined activities, voted on, and appearing in a chapter’s agreed activities plan, because they should be vetted among all members of a chapter so as to be context-sensitive (the RRING Communications Strategy and its advice is also useful here). They must fall within the social mobilization and behavioral change agenda, yet may be selectively focused on any of the topical areas of responsibility found in the RSSR.

Activities may involve and/or address any or all of the institutions of a research and innovation ecosystem (many of which are identified in the RSSR) including the general public, youth, students, the media, industry, or the public authorities that make and apply public policies, and may selectively address influencers that can be recruited as champions of the agenda. Each chapter will be responsible for its own growth, recruiting, and financial sustainability, and administration. A short chapter report to RRING as a whole will allow each chapter to communicate across all of RRING its completed activities and actions, and its activities plan or other important updates and news.

RRING as a whole, even as it grows to be a network of chapters, will require adherence to the recommendations of one overall RRING Communications Strategy, which is integrally included in the present strategy by this reference


Research and innovation ideas and visions come from everywhere. When we connect the potential of the whole world, we can address the biggest challenges of this century.

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