Research Integrity
The University of Fribourg promotes a culture of research integrity by encouraging responsible and transparent practices throughout the research process.
Research integrity is essential to trustworthy, responsible, and high-quality research. At the University of Fribourg, all people involved in research — researchers, students, technical staff, and administrative staff — share a commitment to fair, honest, transparent, and responsible scientific practice.
Our key principles
At Unifr, research should be conducted with care, transparency and responsibility towards society, the environment, nature, research participants, animals and research objects.
In practice, this means paying particular attention to:
- Responsible research processes: careful design, conduct, analysis, documentation and publication of research.
- Research involving human beings: respect for legal requirements, ethics approvals, data protection, consent, safety and personality rights.
- Supervision and power asymmetries: fair, respectful and transparent supervision, with proper recognition of contributions.
- Open science and research data: making research outputs and data accessible where possible, in line with FAIR principles and legal obligations.
- Conflicts of interest: disclosing potential or actual conflicts that may affect research, evaluation, recruitment or collaborations.
- External funding and contributions: preserving academic independence, freedom of research and publication, and transparency regarding contributions.
- Assessment and peer review: promoting fair, transparent and qualitative evaluation practices, in line with Unifr’s commitment to CoARA.
- Publications and authorship: ensuring truthful documentation, appropriate authorship and clear recognition of scientific results and contributions.
- Intellectual property and research results: respecting third-party rights and clarifying ownership, use and publication rights in collaborations.
For detailed procedures, legal bases and more, please consult the full Code of Conduct and the related directives.
Further Resources
Regulations on the procedure to follow in cases of suspected scientific misconduct (FR/DE)
Regulations concerning the procedure for imposing disciplinary sanctions (FR/DE)
University of Fribourg Mission Statement
Code of Conduct for Scientific Integrity (swiss-academies.ch)