CODE OF ETHICS

   

Nandha Engineering College (NEC) is keen to restoring and maintaining highest standards of honesty and liability in carrying out academic and research activities within the campus.

Objectives of Ethical Committee

• Ensure the highest scientific and ethical standards of research at NEC.
• Ensure the highest scientific and ethical standards of research at NEC
• Normative ethics- includes determining what is right and wrong
• Compliance- includes instituted policies and regulations at the university
• Rigor and reproducibility – only kind of science that can offer social value and justify risks to subjects and financial investment in research.
• Social Value- means that research addresses problems of importance to society, generating knowledge used to solve real-world problems through new technologies or procedures.

Misconduct in Academic Research

Fabrication and falsification of data, plagiarism, or dishonesty in proposing, conducting, or presenting scientific results are all examples of academic research misconduct. Academic misconduct also includes deliberate, dangerous, or negligent deviations from accepted research practice, such as flouting an agreed protocol if and when this failure provokes absurd risk or harm to people or the environment, and when it facilitates research misconduct by collusion in, or concealment of, such actions by others.

Misconduct includes (and is not limited to) the following acts:

Plagiarism:

Premeditated replication of a manuscript, data, results, images, figures, process and ideas from others work, reproducing others results without proper consent from the original authors.

Piracy: The deliberate exploitation of ideas from others without proper acknowledgement

Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights:

 Failure to observe legal norms regarding copyright and the moral rights of authors.

Abuse of Research Resources:

Failure to observe the rules concerning copyright and IPR of author

Defamation:

 Failure to observe relevant legal norms governing libel and slander.

Misinterpretation:

The deliberate attempt to represent falsely or unfairly the ideas or work of other research

Personation:

Depredation and submitting others research as one own

Fabrication and Fraud:

Data fabrication without doing proper experiments, falsification of experimental data and ideas without sufficient replication of experiments deliberate reporting of data with misleading interpretations

Sabotage:

 Acting to prevent others from completing their work. This includes stealing or cutting pages out of library books or otherwise damaging them; or willfully disrupting the experiments of others; or endangering institutional access to licensed research resources by willfully failing to observe their terms and conditions.

Professorial misconduct:

Professorial acts those are arbitrary, biased or exploitative.

Denying access to information or material:

To deny others access arbitrarily to scholarly resources or to deliberately and groundlessly impede their progress

Misconduct in formal examinations:

Averting others from using instruments, stealing others laboratory notebooks and damaging others laboratory notebooks

Violations of proper academic practice can be divided into two categories.

1. Minor Violations:

Minor violations might arise due to inexperience or a lack of understanding of academic integrity standards, and they are generally characterised by the lack of dishonest intent on the part of the perpetrator.

They can be the result of:

a. Weak procedures and methods that may jeopardize the integrity of the research but are not done on purpose or recklessly;

b. Weaknesses that pose no major risks to either subjects or policies that they may influence on the whole, these minor violations can be seen as failings that reflect only poor, rather than unacceptable practices, and thus primarily require additional training and development rather than any formal disciplinarily.

2. Major Violations:

Interviews shall be conducted with the complainant and the respondent. All individuals interviewed during the investigation will be asked to respect the confidential nature of the investigation.

Investigation report and recommendations

 The Ethics Committee will produce a report stating: the procedures under which the formal investigation was conducted; how and, where appropriate, from whom information was obtained; the finding of the committee and the basis for these; a summary of the views of the respondent; and a description of any recommendations made by the committee.

Based on the investigation report and recommendations of the Ethics Committee, the Disciplinary Committee may decide on penalties (when considered appropriate)

Penalties

Disciplinary actions recommended by the research committee may include but are not limited to:

1. 1. Resubmission of an assignment or academic work
   2. A failing grade for the examination or specific assigned exercise; or a failing grade for the course as a whole, depending on the importance of the work to the overall course grade
   3. A letter of reprimand, issued by the chair of the Disciplinary Committee, which may or may not be recorded on the scholar’s file
   4. Suspension from the programme (for Students)
   5. Suspension of grant/contract (For faculty)
   6. Revocation of a degree or certificate (For Students)