Code of Conduct

Preamble 

The DTP Joint Conference is a yearly event held for postgraduate researchers from the SCENARIO, London, and SSCP DTPs. It is organised and run by a committee of student volunteers representing each of the doctoral training programmes. The conference offers a platform for students to present their research, and to discover the work being carried out by their peers across the broad spectrum of natural sciences research. 

Each year the conference adopts a unique theme, with last year’s conference exploring the “Dynamic Earth”. This year, we will be focussing on public engagement, exploring how our work impacts those outside our field of research, and how we can best share our research. With this new theme adopted, we would like speakers to be able to share their work after the conference, as long as the presentation doesn’t contain any confidential research. We would like to provide a means to share and publish your presentation to a wider audience. 

This document presents the principles and code of conduct adopted by the DTP Joint Conference. The aim is to promote ethical integrity and an inclusive, constructive and positive approach to science within the broad scope of research conducted by joint DTP student researchers. 

The standards set out in this document are intended to guide all participants and speakers of the conference, on the expected and required behaviour and conduct. We encourage the reporting of any misconduct by following the guidelines outlined in this document. The DTP Joint Conference Committee are reachable at dtpconf@protonmail.com to address any unresolved issues relating to ethics and misconduct. Any such queries will be treated with strict confidentiality by committee members. 

General Principles 

The Joint DTP Conference is committed to establishing a fair, safe, open, respectful, and ethically correct environment for sharing research and ideas. We encourage all students to pursue integrity, honesty, and responsibility, and to treat other researchers with due courtesy, and respect. In particular we ask that you will: 

• Present your research honestly and openly, demonstrating scientific rigour. Findings and interpretations should be reported accurately and objectively, along with statistical uncertainties where applicable. 
• Uphold diversity and equality as essential values for an equal scientific community. Intimidation, harassment, bullying, discrimination, coercion, and plagiarism are considered unethical behaviours. 
• Take responsibility to act where possible to prevent misconduct, and to report cases of misconduct to the Joint DTP Conference committee or to your DTP administrator where appropriate. 

Any unacceptable behaviour, including but not limited to, discrimination, harassment or bullying in any form, disruption of presentations and inappropriate use of the conference platform, will result in immediate action including removal from the session, day or entire conference and a report to your DTP administrator.  

Presentations 

Authors are expected to demonstrate scientific rigour in their research. We understand that a full exposition of methods and analysis will not be possible in the limited time window available for each speaker, however we encourage you to be prepared to answer questions from other students. 

Ensure that you credit those who have contributed to your work, making a clear distinction between the researchers of others, and research you have conducted yourself. 

Disclose any conflicts of interest that could compromise the trustworthiness of work, and clearly distinguish scientific comments from personal opinions when presenting and discussing research 

Recording & Social Media 

We encourage students to share their research, and the research of others’ outside of the conference, especially with a focus on making it accessible to those outside your own field of research. The Joint DTP Conference committee wish to promote open discussion on social media, including blogging and microblogging platforms such as Twitter. The following rules aim to clarify how to be respectful when sharing others’ work, presenting their research output. 

If a presenter wishes for their work to remain confidential and not shared outside of the conference, they should state this at the start of the presentation. We also encourage the adoption of the “no tweet” symbol on relevant slides to indicate that figures and results should not be shared online or with others. 

It is prohibited to take photos, screenshots or record scientific materials shown in any format of presentation without the consent of the presenter (i.e. if a presenter states that their research is confidential, you must NOT share any of their results or figures without their direct and explicit consent). The presenter upholds the right to withdraw their consent for research to be shared at any before and after presenting their work. 

Presentations will be recorded to be made available to researchers unable to attend the conference in its entirety (this may be due to pre-existing commitments, time zone differences, etc.). We ask that you do not share your own recordings of presentations and discussions, unless granted permission by the committee or the speaker(s) involved. Any recordings of conference attendees used in a misleading or derogatory way is strictly prohibited. 

We encourage making use of the official hashtags, #DTPConf2020 and #engagement, when sharing snippets of the conference on social media.