IRC-R: Overview 2025

The University of Maryland, College Park ("UMD") Office of Integrity and Responsible Conduct ("OIRC") has created an institutional-level Integrity and Responsible Conduct Program (“IRC@UMD”) that offers programming, resources, and support to the UMD community. The goals of OIRC’s IRC@UMD program are to foster, promote, and ensure integrity and responsible conduct in research (“IRC-R”) and professional activities (“IRC-PA”) at UMD.

IRC@UMD's IRC-R* programming, including this course and the other courses available to you in the Integrity and Responsible Conduct Open Learning catalog, is intended to:

• broadly foster a culture of research integrity by aiding our research community in understanding the expectations for conducting all aspects of their research responsibly;
• provide a foundation for acting in accordance with those expectations by offering guidance, best practices, and tools;
• help researchers generate and disseminate research and knowledge with integrity and rigor;
• ensure appropriate stewardship of funds that support our important work; and
• help our researchers fulfill related training requirements (including those set forth by funding agencies that support our work).

* UMD has chosen to use the term “integrity and responsible conduct in research” (“IRC-R”), rather than RCR/RECR, as a constant reminder of the inherent link between research integrity and the practice of conducting research responsibly.

This course, offered as part of IRC@UMD's IRC-R programming, serves as a primer on the practice of conducting research responsibly, ethically (“RCR/RECR”), and with integrity. Topics touched upon in this overview course include: