The NEID Science Team has high expectations for its members to behave ethically and collegially. We understand science is maximized when we treat each other well in pursuit of our shared science goals, with special concern for the training and professional development of junior members. Team members should strive to be generous and humane and appreciate each others’ contributions and needs.
Senior members have an especial obligation to demonstrate and promote such behavior in their words and deeds.
Standards for Professional Behavior
The NEID Science Team adopts the AAS Code of Ethics and the AAS Anti-Harassment Policy for meetings. We recognize that these documents will change with time and are necessarily incomplete and imperfect, but they serve as important templates and guides to professional norms.
Matters involving publication of results using NEID Science Team data are also governed by the NEID Publication Policy.
Policies for Dealing with Violations
Overall
Senior team members should proactively create an environment in which social friction and minor or potential conduct violations can be managed before they become major concerns requiring formal procedures and sanctions. This includes soliciting and listening to team members’ concerns, and modeling good behavior.
In cases where these informal methods are insufficient to prevent continued or serious misconduct, violations of these standards will be handled by the NEID Science Team PI, Suvrath Mahadevan.
Leadership and Ombudsperson
The PI will resolve reports of misconduct and impose sanctions with the advice and consent of NEID leadership. “Advice and consent” here means that the PI will consult with leadership and not act without their support. This does not require leadership to be unanimous in their recommendations. “Leadership” in this document (only) means the PI and:
– the NOIRLab NEID Instrument Scientist (Sarah Logsdon)
– the NEID Instrument Team Project Scientists (Jason Wright and Paul Robertson).
If these roles change in the future, the leadership will be reassigned to always include at least four members who collectively represent more than one institution and gender.
When deciding sanctions, the PI will also consult with the NEID ombudsperson (Cullen Blake), who will serve as a representative of and advocate for the rest of the NEID team, especially any victims of misconduct. This role will always be held by a member of the team at a different institution from the PI, and they can serve as a mediator, filter, and/or anonymizer between the complainant(s) and NEID Science Team leadership.
Sanctions
No team member will be involved in deciding sanctions upon themselves.
Sanctions will be imposed with an appreciation that while we will always strive to avoid misconduct, some level of infractions are inevitable and would happen with any collaboration. Ideally, they will be managed constructively and learned from, especially for first and minor offenses, and for junior members of the team. The primary purpose of sanctions will be to protect team members, especially junior members, from the negative consequences of others’ behavior, and to maintain a safe research environment that promotes good behavior and science.
Sanctions should be proportionate to the severity of harm done and the persistence of the infractions, and might include:
- Warning
- Probation
- Complaint to the AAS Ethics Committee, a university, or other relevant bodies
- Removal from specific projects or interactions with certain other members
- Removal from architect or builder status (which affects co-authorship rights)
- Removal from all interactions beyond co-authorship and acknowledgements
- Removal from all associations and interactions with the group, including authorship
Sanctions involving removal of authorship privileges would presumably be reserved for extreme cases, and the intent would be to remove associations and collaboration of the sanctioned person with other members of the NEID Science Team. This means they would not be invited onto new team papers, and would be asked to remove themselves from papers to which they were already attached. The intent is not to deny anyone credit for work they have done, and authorship on papers to which they had already made inarguably author-level contributions would need to be managed on a case-by-case basis, for instance by separating their contributions out to separate papers.
Policies for Reporting
If a member has concerns about violations of NEID Science Team standards, they can report these to NEID Science Team leadership in three ways:
- Direct or indirect communication with NEID Science Team leadership
- Communication via the NEID ombudsperson (Cullen Blake). The ombudsperson can serve, for instance, to anonymize interactions between a team member and leadership.
- Anonymous reporting via this web form. The form sends an email to the PI, the NEID Science Team leadership, and the NEID ombudsperson.
Team members may also wish to take advantage of ombudspeople at Penn State, who serve as mediators and resources for informal conflict resolution. Similar people at other partner institutions are the ombuds at UCI , and human resources at AURA (which governs NOIRLab and has anonymous feedback allowed here).
Team members should be aware that many members of the NEID team leadership, in particular faculty at universities (this means Jason Wright, Paul Robertson, and Suvrath Mahadevan) are considered mandated reporters under Title IX. This means that they are required to report cases of sexual discrimination and harassment at their institutions to their institution’s Title IX office.
This means, for instance, that a report to NEID leadership of sexual harassment by a Penn State employee may be passed on to the PSU Title IX office for further investigation. The anonymity of the original reporter can be preserved in such situations. Typically, the ombuds or the Title IX office at a university can help clarify how this works.
Amendments
This Code of Conduct and the NEID Publication Policy can be updated by unanimous agreement of the leadership, in consultation with the ombudsperson. All team members must be informed of the changes and given a reasonable time to consider them before they take effect.
Small or inconsequential changes will become binding on all team members as soon as they take effect.
For major changes, all team members must actively re-sign the Code of Conduct.
Whether changes are “small or inconsequential” or “major” will be determined by the ombudsperson a reasonable amount of time after the proposed changes are announced to the team.
Dissemination
It is the responsibility of team members to ensure that new members they bring into the team (e.g. their advisees) understand this and other relevant policies.
Membership on the NEID Science Team is conditional upon acceptance of the Code of Conduct. All members of the NEID Science Team should put their names in the signature document to indicate that they have read and agree to abide by this policy (which includes, by reference, the AAS Code of Ethics, the AAS Anti-Harassment Policy for meetings, and the NEID Publication Policy. All signatories have the option of withdrawing from the Code and team at any time.
Amended 1 November 2023