Equality, diversity and inclusion
Diversity Equality and Inclusion Plan for ICARUS Oceans Group.
Within the ICARUS Oceans group we are committed to creating and preserving a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion. As individuals each member of the team is an important asset to the team each with different life experience, inventiveness, self-expression, knowledge and capabilities, all working together to make ICARUS Oceans group a strong unit.
We embrace and encourage individuals differences in ethnicity, age, family or marital status, colour, language, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, race, disability, political affiliation and other characteristics that make each of us unique.
Here, we outline a set of work practice guidelines that aim to allow staff and students to best manage their work/life balance:
Each individual within the group has the responsibility to treat others with respect and dignity at all times. Each individual is expected to conduct themselves in a way that reflects inclusion during work, at work functions and in other occasions where representing the group.
Each individual within the group should work in a way that promotes
- Respectful co-operation and communication between all within the group
- Recognition of the importance of work/life balance ensuring flexible work schedules to allow inclusion of members with differing needs.
- Honest discussion to allow the representation of all individuals within the group
Below you will find a list of good work practice guidelines. The idea behind these guidelines is to create a working group that allows all members to feel valued, supported and work in an environment free of discrimination.
Work Practices
Full flexibility is provided for the working hours during the week allowing you to choose how to fulfil your contractual hours (guideline of 37 hours for postdocs can be applied for academic staff and PhD students). Homeworking is supported within the guidelines below. This should allow individuals with childcare / other responsibilities in the home to fulfil obligations both at work and home.
Anchor Days
We recognise the importance of meeting in person and identify Anchor Days to support this. The motivation for Anchor days is that colleagues meet face to face and build a sense of team. Each individual should attend the university in person where possible on a Tuesday each week to facilitate in person meetings. These meetings include our scheduled group meeting, social events, and one-to-one meetings. Arrangements can be agreed on a case by case basis if this is not possible.
Each individual ensures a daily rest period of at least 11 hours per day. It is also important to schedule rest periods during working days to ensure meal breaks and well-being breaks. You should have at least two 24 hour periods of rest within a week.
Core Hours
Meetings should be scheduled between 10 am and 3 pm Monday to Thursday. Those not on an Anchor Day (i.e. Tuesday) must allow for the option of remote participation. Where possible meetings should be scheduled to last 50 minutes rather than the full hour to allow for a 10 minute break between consecutive meetings.
Deep Work Days
We recognise the difficulties of focusing on deep work such as research in an increasingly distracted world. To address this we have a Deep Work Day on Friday. Deep work days should be reserved for research activity with no meetings being conducted or attended and no emails sent to Oceanography colleagues.
Email and Slack
We recognise the pressures that can be put on staff from work communication outside of work hours. Emails should be sent between 9am and 5pm Monday to Thursday with the exception of public holidays which should be treated as out of hours.
For colleagues who wish to catch up on email out of hours – it is recommended that they use the “Send Later” function to send within the designated time period. Special dispensation can be expected if in a separate time zone due to work travel.
Whats app/ personal phone
Personal phone usage for work purposes should be limited to occasions when there are no other options available, ie emergency or in the field for safety reasons. The use of Whats-App or other personal phone messaging services to contact colleagues with regards to a working matter should be limited to when in the field or other locations and reserved for work in the field or emergency situations where contact is required.
When in shared office/meeting space ensure your phone is on silent/vibrate and if required to take a call make sure you proceed to a space where you will not interrupt others to do so.
Training
It is recommended that each person within the group completed the online training available within the university webpage on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion:
Reporting issues
Any individual who feels they have been unfairly treated or discriminated against by an other/s in the group or wider university environment should first report this to the head of group Gerard McCarthy (gerard.mccarthy@mu.ie) or Niamh Cahill (niamh.cahill@mu.ie) or the University HR department (humanresources@mu.ie).
ICARUS Oceans Group Open science Guidelines
Open science is an approach which allows for open innovation and sharing of published work based on fairness, inclusion , equity and sharing. It allows people involved in producing the work to be valued and ultimately ensures the reproductivity of the works and increased value. It also allows an increased rigor, accountability ad reproducibility of the research. Open science also allows individuals to benefit from current scientific findings and can lead to more collaboration and subsequent benefits arising from this. It can also reduce duplication of research and reduce the cost of accessing data and thus help with moving the scientific field further ahead in a more cost and time efficient manner.
It is therefore the ICARUS Oceans group policy that as far as possible scientific finding should be published in open access journals. High impact publications will be pursued when appropriate with the goal to maximise the publicity of research publications. Essentially any peer-reviewed publications must be immediately available from the date of publication (no embargo permitted).
Any code or data used within the publication should also be open as possible and as closed as necessary. To allow for this data and code should be placed in the appropriate repositories or published as appendices as appropriate. Where possible it is encouraged to participate in the open review process from the publishing journal. It is also imperative that each publication includes the correct acknowledgments to funding bodies and correct projects that allowed for participation in the works, allowing the authors to retain intellectual property rights. Essentially this allows the authors to retain the intellectual ownership of the work, whilst still allowing it to be made Open access.
The updated Science Foundation Ireland policy requires that all publications fully or partly funded by SFI must all have The Rights Retention Wording and the publication must be available under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY). The CC-BY is a type of copyright licence that allows the original creator (author(s)) to grant permission to reuse, distribute and build upon their existing work to the public. Whilst importantly still allowing the original author/s must be attributed to any reuse of the original work. This can be achieved by including the most appropriate of the following two statements:
‘This publication has emanated from research conducted with the financial support of Science Foundation Ireland under Grant number [ ]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission’.
Or
‘This publication has emanated from research supported in part by a grant from Science Foundation Ireland under Grant number [ ]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission’
Low carbon travel policy
As an environmentally conscience group it is important that we try to where possible to reduce the carbon output from any travel we are required to undertake as part of our position. Below are some suggestions on how this can be done
For short journeys/ journeys within Ireland
- Where possible travel by foot or bike to work
- Use Public transport (Train or Bus) or car sharing to reduce carbon output.
- If possible, try to use the Train other than other forms of public transport as they produce less carbon.
- If taking a car in unavoidable pick the smallest car suitable for the number of passengers and choose an electric car if possible.
For longer Journeys
- If travelling to UK investigate ferry options rather than flying.
- If Ferry options are available for other routes, please consider these before booking flights (I.e. ferry to Rosslare to Cherbourg)
- If you need to fly, try to source the airline that has the least carbon output for the route you need. Some flight-booking webpages would allow you to check this using the eco-friendly search filter.
- If you need to fly consider using an airline that offers to offset their carbon
- Where Carbon offset is not available as part of the fund consider the use of a donation fund to reduce the department/ your personal carbon emission.
- Be sure to sit in economy and where possible use direct flight to limit the carbon produced by the journey: planes use a significant amount of their fuel during take-off and landing so reducing the number of flights will reduce the impact.
- While it may only make a small difference where possible take daytime flights to take advantage of the reduction in trapped solar heat.