Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Electrical Engineers Computer Society (IEEE-CS) have a joint software engineering
code of ethics and professional practice that prescribes how to make software devel-
opment 'a benefi cial and respected profession' (ACM/IEEE-CS 1999 ). This code
covers eight principles: public interest, the interests of client and employer, product
standard, professional judgement, management of the software development life
cycle, profession reputation, concern for colleagues in the fi eld and lifelong learn-
ing for practitioners. This code of ethics is similar to that of the British Computer
Society (BCS) which has fewer but similarly worded categories including public
interest, professional competence and integrity, duty to relevant authority and duty
to the profession (BCS 2011 ).
These two, and others, are covered by Bott ( 2005 ) whose chapter headings give
an indication of where the ethical concerns are situated: e.g. law and government,
nature of a profession, professional bodies in computing, what is an organisation,
fi nancing a start-up company, management accounting, investment and appraisal.
Therein are codes of ethics for professional services and societies that are related
yet different from codes of ethics for academic research. The former pertain to
business issues, the latter mostly to medical research, although primary data
collection from human interviews, surveys and the like is also included. It is
notable that these codes of ethics focus on how research is carried out, yet not
whether it should be carried out. The same distinction often holds for academic
research codes.
In computing academia, researchers are governed by both types of codes, yet
research projects requiring ethics approval are ultimately approved by an IRB based
on research-oriented rather than professional ethics, i.e. on the rights of the subject
rather than on how professional responsibilities are carried out. This subject orienta-
tion is interesting because (a) an IRB does not necessarily decide whether research
should be pursued or not, just that it is done correctly; (b) an IRB typically does not
deal with technology research, if humans are not (directly) involved; and (c) an IRB
tends to be concerned with a human as opposed to the community in which that
human may inhabit (we come back to this last point again several times below).
Because of the human orientation, though, research codes of ethics mainstays
include voluntary informed consent, right to withdraw and avoiding deception. The
Singapore Statement on Research Integrity (Steneck et al. 2010 ) is a high-level
'global guide to the responsible conduct of research' that states fi ve basic ethical
principles which are similar to the professional codes - honesty, accountability, pro-
fessional courtesy and fairness and good stewardship - but then moves on to clarify
these in terms of research activities, e.g. research methods, research fi ndings,
authorship, publication acknowledgement, peer review and confl ict of interest. The
Singapore Statement intends support from 'appropriate national bodies and organ-
isations' (Steneck et al. 2010 ). These are most likely based or at least linked to a
clinical and/or medical code of ethics, e.g. Emanuel et al.'s ( 2000 ) highly cited
'What Makes Clinical Research Ethical?'. For example, in South Africa, the local
ethics guidelines are issued by the South African Medical Review Council (MRC
2006 ). Therefore, when an academic research project is deemed to have ethical
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