Code of conduct

Purpose of document

• A code of conduct is a statement of understanding among ourselves about expectations of behavior and values, and as an external statement, reflects our commitments to the community.

• This code of conduct applies to all members of M²LInES without exception. We also expect external collaborators to comply with this code when interacting with M²LInES, and we extend guidelines (such as inclusion for authorship) to external collaborators.

• Key aspects of this document: Inclusivity, professionalism and conduct, unethical and/or unacceptable behavior, authorship, scientific integrity, and conflicts of interest.

• Management committee (Laure, Johanna, Alistair, Carlos, Ryan) will deal with any issues arising:

Inclusivity

• Enjoyable, high-quality research can only be conducted when you feel safe, secure, and supported. All group members are thus dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, and/or religion ¹ (or lack thereof), family status or socio-economic status. The group members also recognize that some of those biases can be unconscious and creep into different aspects of Academic life and research, such as meetings, publications, citations, hiring, etc. Members should strive to consciously combat those biases and bring awareness to others.

• Obligations to the M²LInES group: We’re on the same team. Help each other, especially those junior to you even if not directly working for you.

• Be aware of, and address your positionality, power, privileges, and values.

• Early career researchers (ECRs) face additional challenges, having to navigate their career path in addition to performing their work. This additional uncertainty in their career can lead to added stress and possible burnout. If anything is placing undue stress or preventing ECRs from performing at their potential, they are encouraged to discuss with their group lead or with any other mentors they feel most comfortable. Sharing these issues can reduce stress and help others be accommodating towards their needs, and the team may be able to assist.

• The M²LInES team follows the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As such all members are encouraged to communicate openly and frequently about their research, activities and the obstacles they might encounter along the way.

Professionalism and conduct

• Be respectful in all interactions, communications, and actions.

• Take care of your choice of medium for communicating sensitive matters.

• English is the official language during meetings, group interactions and communications.

• Make a point in learning people’s names and how to pronounce them correctly.

• Meetings and interactions:

  • Be inclusive of all present, listen, invite input, be constructive.

  • Be mindful of dominant personalities, including yourself.

  • Employ appropriate language inclusive of all backgrounds.

  • Follow appropriate etiquette:

    • In virtual meetings, raise hands in your video stream or use the software equivalent.
    • Wait for the chair or moderator to give you permission to speak.
    • Help the chair when they are unaware of an issue.

  • Avoid side conversations. Multiple conversations in a room are distracting, and show disrespect to others. This applies to chat windows while video conferencing too - consider whether typing a comment is serving the speaker and audience.

  • Meetings should be structured. For meetings with multiple participants, an agenda, a chair (responsible for following the agenda and staying on schedule), and a moderator (the discussion leader) are recommended. For business meetings, or meetings that need a strategic report for management, the project manager will be appointed as the note taker.

• Respect other’s working hours and limited availability or response time due to family, personal, and other situations. While we are used to instant messaging systems (e.g. slack) reaching into each other’s offices and homes, it is not appropriate to assume the recipient is not otherwise engaged.

• Avoid misunderstandings and exclusion. Open communication of intent and understanding are key to avoiding misunderstandings and inadvertent exclusion.

Team meetings

• The team has limited occasions to meet and interact with each other, so it is particularly important to make these opportunities as effective as possible for everyone.

• The moderator should send the agenda with enough notice for people to review it and add on items, if need be.

• Similarly, if items on the agenda need advanced review time, they should be sent with enough notice for everyone to get a chance to review them and comment on them before the meeting.

• The project manager is the chair and note taker during meetings with the whole team. During subgroup meetings, a chair and note taker should be designated, if need be.

• During the meeting:

  • Be present. Listen to others and avoid multitasking.
  • Questions are best asked verbally, not in a written form. Raise your hand (or software equivalent), and wait for the chair or moderator to give you permission to speak.
  • Avoid side conversations. This applies to conversations in the chat window while videoconferencing.
  • Additional points/comments that one prefers not to raise verbally during the meeting and side conversations on a specific topic are best reserved for our Slack channel after the meeting is over.

Unethical and/or unacceptable behavior

• Unacceptable behaviors include racism, hate speech, harassment, threats, unwelcome sexual attention or contact, personal attacks.

• If you are the subject of, or witness to, inappropriate behavior please inform a member of the management committee, or ask another member whom you trust to inform the committee.

• Watch out for microaggressions . Be aware that your actions can be hurtful to others or contribute to a negative environment even if you had no intent of harm. Listen. Offer a genuine apology. Commit to learning and doing better. ²

• Sanctions or consequences

  • The management committee takes inappropriate behavior seriously and persistent violations of the code may result in being ejected from the group, loss of funding, and/or notifying the employing institution.

Authorship

• We will follow the Vancouver Group recommendations (VGR) on authorship for all M²LInES publications and products (including software, datasets and presentations). The authorship guidelines apply to both M²LInES members and external collaborators.

• We will use the CRediT taxonomy for describing the authorship contributions.

• Ideas for manuscripts are often the results of group discussions and/or casual conversations among different members. Authors should strive to keep lines of communication with the rest of the team open at all stages of a manuscript creation, but especially in this early stage, when the same idea might have bubbled simultaneously in different minds. The creation process of manuscripts should then allow sufficient time for co-authors to contribute and review. Participants should strive to contribute and respond in a timely manner.

• Consequently, authorship should be established early in the creation process and established openly by expressing intent to the group; there are often parallel efforts underway in such an interconnected project and we wish to not deprive anyone of the opportunity to publish their own efforts when it appears to be a duplication or “scooped”.

• Appropriate acknowledgement of M²LInES is expected in publications and products. Prior to publications or any external communications, authors need to have written approval from NYU on whether our Grantor would like to be acknowledged. NYU will then ask them. If they do, the Grantor will provide the manner and wording of such acknowledgment. Should a publisher for an academic publication require the identification of the Grantor, you may identify them to the extent required by such publisher, as long as you give NYU at least 15 days advance notice to ask them.

Scientific integrity

• Research should be evidence based and presented accurately and honestly, without misleading statements or withholding of pertinent information.

• Research should ultimately be confirmed and verified by peers, i.e. published in peer-reviewed journals.

• Transparency and reproducibility of the research and publication process are required, not only to aid the peer review process but also as a guiding principle.

• The M²LInES team is committed to disseminate its research as broadly as possible. Whenever possible, all publications should be submitted open access, whether via the journal as a whole, or via payment of an open access fee. When not possible, all coauthors should take steps to submit the manuscript in their respective institutions’ internal server for publications, and also a pre-review server such as arXiv. Please note that the Grantor has a nonexclusive license to copy, publish and distribute any publications, studies, research or other copyrightable works funded by this Grant.

• Data used in publications should be made openly available, not just upon request. This can be prohibitive for some datasets but reduced forms of the data, as presented in the publication, are a minimum requirement. This is becoming the minimum standard at many society journals.

• Copyright on codes: All codes produced within the context of M²LInES should be hosted by the M²LInES GitHub organization. Software produced in collaboration with M²LInES but not solely for M²LInES should be open source and accessible without fee or authentication barriers. It is reasonable to use private repositories during development. The particular license is up to the original authors but i) should ideally be consistent with your host institution, and ii) must be either FAIR or open source. We suggest the MIT license. For other products such as text, images, websites, etc., we suggest the Creative Commons CC-BY license.

• M²LInES scientific impact will rise higher if all its parts are lifted higher. As such, members are encouraged to amplify each other’s contributions to the project when opportunities arise (after checking for permissions).

Conflicts of interest

• Many members of M²LInES are involved in other projects or have collaborators conducting related research. If a research idea being actively pursued by M²LInES happens to overlap with a colleague or collaborator of M²LInES then there can be a conflict of interest, or a perception of such even if none exists. We expect members to recognize or anticipate these situations and to inform M²LInES of any overlap to avoid problems arising, discussing them with the management committee.

• Disclosure and regular communication within M²LInES is by far the best way to avoid misunderstandings and conflicts among the group.