ENERI organised a Research Integrity Boot Camp on April 9-10, 2018 at the National Research Council (NCR) in Rome. The RIO boot camps organised in the U.S. functioned as the model for the ENERI RIO boot camp in Rome. While this was a boot camp with an integrity focus it also highlighted research ethics and overlapping issues in line with the aims of the ENERI project. The boot camp focused on the ALLEA Code of Conduct, conflict of interest, authorship and plagiarism, GDPR, building a culture of integrity, and ethics review in non-medical fields.
All sessions involved discussion and debate around cases. The heterogeneity of national and institutional guidelines and procedures, and of participant experiences and views was truly exposed in the discussions, and while a challenge for concluding the cases, it also vividly demonstrated the legitimacy of differences. However, there clearly is much common ground and interest for exchange of views and learning from good practices. This was also reflected in the feedback from the boot camp: The participants rated the boot camp as an overall positive experience. The boot camp hosted 21 participants from the ENRIO network (European Network of Research Integrity Offices). The facilitators of the boot camp were research ethics and integrity experts of ENERI. A second boot camp, in which the ENERI partners will focus more on research ethics issues will be held in early 2019.