No room for discrimination or harassment

Discrimination and harassment violate scientific integrity - but the damage they do goes beyond that. According to Janet Hering, they also represent a waste of resources including energy, talent, finances, reputation and culture. For all researchers, scientific integrity is the highest good, and the one most worthy of protection. The Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences published a new code of conduct for scientific integrity in May ¹ . It lists and describes all the things we researchers should not do, including some obvious ones, like falsifying data or incorrectly assigning authorship. I was struck by one point in particular in the section on scientific misconduct in collaborative projects, a point the Academies of Arts and Sciences defines as misconduct: "Displaying any form of harassment or discrimination, especially when based on cultural, socio-demographic, or other personal characteristics or professional backgrounds." Of course, the most important argument why researchers shouldn't discriminate or harass each other is obvious: because no one should. But there's another reason why we ought to pay special attention to this in our scientific endeavours and in our institutions: discrimination and harassment are simply a complete waste of a wide range of resources.