Our commitment to international collaborations

International scholars contribute greatly to the intellectual and cultural fabric of UCI. Our activities, programs, classes, workshops, lectures, and everyday interactions are enriched by our acceptance of one another. Further, global collaborations are critical to the advancement of knowledge, spur innovation, and are fundamental to our core values and research mission.

UCI embraces and promotes international collaborations because we are dedicated to academic freedom and an open, inclusive academic environment. While we ardently support our international community, we must also remain committed to academic and legal integrity in our non-domestic collaborations, including policies on scholarly relationships in federally sponsored research; sharing of materials, ideas, and information; federal agency and UC disclosure requirements; and data protection. UC’s Office of Ethics, Compliance and Audit Services has a helpful FAQ covering these topics, as well as resources related to visiting scholars, shipping, data integrity, and travel.

UCI recognizes and understands the federal government’s concerns that some foreign entities and governments have attempted and may continue to attempt to inappropriately acquire technical knowledge, information, and access to intellectual property. These are real concerns based on actual experiences. These malign activities compromise U.S. competitiveness, threaten our national and economic security, and negatively impact UCI’s scholars.

As we look to the future of an increasingly global UCI, it is important to communicate guiding principles for open and trusted collaborations amid an ever-changing societal and political dynamic and to help promote the alignment of international collaborations with UCI’s mission and values.

• Collaborators and partner institutions should share UCI’s mission to catalyze the community and enhance lives through rigorous academics, cutting-edge research, and dedicated public service. To this end, international partnerships should enhance faculty and student experiences by providing opportunities and perspectives that align with UCI’s mission, goals, principles, and policies.
• International engagements should be sustainable and honest collaborations. An important feature of these arrangements is academic/scholarly reciprocity, which is a recognized characteristic of activities that are consistent with UCI’s established principles and our nation’s interests. This includes international collaborators’ commitment to upholding the same standards for ensuring research integrity that are applicable to the UCI research enterprise and community, including the stewardship of data and its use, interpretation, security and privacy, preservation, and management.
• UCI will continue to vigorously support our international research collaborations, while also ensuring that we, as an institution and as individuals, comply with all federal regulations, laws, and UC policies, particularly with respect to disclosure expectations. The UCI research community should understand the importance of disclosure and transparency and recognize that these are best practices for mitigating risks, both to the institution and to individuals.

Since its founding, UCI has been built as a multicultural community of people from diverse backgrounds. Let us strive to learn from each other in an atmosphere of positive engagement and mutual respect while remaining mindful that we have an ethical and legal obligation to be transparent about our international collaborations with ourselves and with our federal sponsors.

Chancellor Howard Gillman