Ethical Standards and Compliance of Measures
Adherence to ethical standards is integral to the credibility and impact of the INEE Measurement Library work. This is critical for safeguarding the rights of and maintaining the trust of participating stakeholders. All measure packets submitted to the INEE ML are required to comply with the outlined ethical standards:
Intellectual Property and Open Access
The INEE ML strives to contribute to open science. While all measures published in the INEE ML are the intellectual property of the developers, by submitting to ML, the authors agree to have the measurement tools, evidence report, and training materials published on INEE Website, abiding by the FAIR open science principle (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) by the INEE community and external researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders.
As an exception, submission of previously published reports to the INEE ML (e.g., peer-reviewed journal publications) and other special cases, this requirement can be negotiated and discussed for an alternative sharing strategy. In such cases, please reach out to the MLRG Co-chairs at submission to discuss potential solutions.
Copyright and Licensing
By submitting the tool, evidence report, and training materials to the INEE ML, authors agree to publish the submitted materials with Creative Commons licenses. Please make sure the submitted materials include the licensing information, and which license terms authors choose to publish with. We recommend licensing research outputs with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY) which allows users to distribute, adapt, and build on the data (even commercially) as long as they credit the creator and creation in subsequent work. More restricted versions of the open licenses include an Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license where subsequent works must follow the same license terms as the original work and an Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC), which disallows commercial use of the data.
Citation
For each of the documents published in INEE ML, we recommend authors include preferred citation of their own materials, including the list of authors in the appropriate order, the title of the document indicating types of the document (e.g., evidence report, measure, training guidelines, etc), and link to the document. We also recommend that the authors review and include the CrediT author statement for proper acknowledgment of the contributions of each author. (see https://credit.niso.org/)
Attribution
It is the responsibility of the developers to ensure adherence to ethical scientific standards when developing measures. This includes but is not limited to ensuring proper acknowledgment and citation of materials and/or scientific evidence that the measurement packet references. INEE does not take responsibility for improper citations, but should a case arise where a citation is questioned during the peer-review process, INEE will follow up with the developers to ensure proper acknowledgment.