Study title: Communities of PrACTice for Accelerating Gender Equality and Institutional Change in Research and Innovation across Europe (ACT)
Funding organization: European Commission, H2020. Grant Agreement No 788204
Principal investigator: Dr. Jörg Müller, Gender and ICT Research Programme (IN3 – Universitat Oberta de Catalunya). Email: jmuller@uoc.edu Phone: +34 93 450 5260
Survey administrator: [Name, organization and email address]
1. Purpose of the study
The present study forms part of the ACT project (Communities of PrACTice for Accelerating Gender Equality and Institutional Change in Research and Innovation across Europe), a H2020 funded project that seeks to advance gender equality at research performing and research funding organizations in the European Research Area. ACT promotes the creation of Communities of Practice (CoP) as agents to develop gender equality actions, and supports them by facilitating infrastructures and providing new tools for knowledge sharing and collaboration in three fields: careers progression, decision-making, and including a gender dimension in research content and higher education curricula. The project will run for three years, from 2018 until 2021.
This online-survey will be used to monitor and evaluate the institutions that participate in the Communities of Practice supported by ACT regarding its advances on gender equality development and Gender Equality Plans implementation. The results will be also used for gathering high-quality, comparable data across research performing (RPOs) and research funding organisations (RFOs) and might be combined with similar survey results from different organizations.
2. Who takes part in the study
This survey addresses the staff of the institutions (universities, research centres, and research funding organisations) that participate in the Communities of Practice (CoPs) supported by ACT. You have been contacted to participate in this survey because of your membership in one of the institutions that are part of the ACT Communities of Practice. The invitation is sent via e-mail at your institution with a link to the survey.
3. Procedure
The survey consists of several parts related to a different topic each. You are kindly asked to answer as many questions as you can. Answers are saved automatically each time you click on “Next” in the online-survey interface. You can interrupt the survey any moment by clicking “Resume later” at the top of each survey page and come back at a later point in time for final submission. Should you change your mind about answering the survey and want your data deleted you can click on “Exit and clear survey” (also at the top of each page) any time before pressing the "Submit" button located at the last page of the survey.
4. Confidentiality
This questionnaire will be filled out by individuals who belong to the member institutions of the ACT Communities of Practice, anonymously. Your confidentiality will be protected at all times. The online-survey is hosted by on a private virtual server managed by CDmon in a Spanish Data Center, contracted by Fundació per a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (FUOC).
All data that could potentially be used to identify you indirectly (such as professional position, the name of your organisation) will be pseudoanomised after the completion of the survey; the analysis of the data will operate with the pseudo-anonymised dataset.
The current survey uses a [anonymised response | anonymised response with tracking | anonymized response with participant database] mode.
[“Anonymised response” mode means that for this particular survey instance, the system (ACT Limesurvey platform) is configured in such a manner as to not store any meta-information that could be potentially used to link your submission to your person, including the IP address of the computer used, the date and time of your submission or the URL referrer. Nevertheless, you can interrupt the survey any moment by clicking “Resume later” at the top of each survey page and come back at a later point in time for final submission. You can "Exit and clear" your submission any time before the final submission by clicking on the correspond button at the top of any page. Once you have finalized the submission by pressing the "Submit" button at the end of the survey, you cannot delete your data anymore nor can you request its deletion from the survey administrator. We cannot identify your entry in the overall dataset containing all responses. Your submission is anonymous since no personal identifier is stored with your entry in the results table.]
[“Anonymised response with tracking” mode means that for this particular survey instance, the system (ACT Limesurvey platform) is configured in such a manner that it uses a random identifier (also called “token”) to keep track of your submission. We also store with each submission the following meta-information: IP address of computer used, date and time of submission and URL referrer. You can interupt and resume your submission at any time - without manually clicking the "Resume later” button at the top of any page. You can also "Exit and clear" your submission any time before the final submission by clicking on the corresponding button at the top of any page. Once you finalize your submission by clicking the "Submit" button on the last page of the survey, you cannot delete your submission anymore. You can request the deletion of your submission by writing an email to the survey administrator providing the IP address, date and time of your submission. If your entry can be identified unambigiously based upon this information, it can be deleted. Your submission is anonymous since no personal identifier is stored with your entry in the results table.]
[“Anonymised response with participant table” mode means that for this particular survey instance we use a LimeSurvey internal database containing participants names and emails to personalize invitations and reminders as well as keeping track of response rates. We also store with each submission the following meta-information: IP address of computer used, date and time of submission and URL referrer. You can interupt and resume your submission at any time - without manually clicking the "Resume later” button at the top of any page. You can also "Exit and clear" your submission any time including after the final submission by using the personalized survey link send to you and clicking on "Exit and clear" button on the top of any page. Once the survey has been finalized, you can request a deletion of your submission from the result dataset by writing an email to the survey administrator [insert name and email here]; the email address from which the request is send needs to match the entry in our participant database. Under no circumstances will your personal information (email and name) stored in the participant database be linked/stored to the final result dataset containing survey submissions. Your submission is anonymous since no personal identifier is stored with your entry in the results table.]
Administrative access to the current survey instance and hence data in non-aggregated form is granted to the following ACT Consortium members:
• The survey administrator: [Fill in name, organization and email]
• The ACT Limesurvey administrator: Ricard Solans, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, rsolansp@uoc.edu
• The ACT Coordinator Jörg Müller, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, jmuller@uoc.edu
The website platform is also certified with secure protocols (SSL) that ensure encryption mechanisms to allow the secure transmission of data over the network.
Your personal data will be treated in accordance with the privacy policy of the ACT project, which you can access from the ACT project's website (https://act-on-gender.eu/privacy). You can exercise your rights of accessing, modifying, opposing, and cancelling your data by contacting us via email at fuoc_pd@uoc.edu, in case the present survey was carried out in mode "Anonymised response with participant table". These rights are protected by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR 2016/679) and by the Spanish Organic Law 3/2018 of 5 December 2018, on the Protection of Personal Data and the Warranty of Digital Rights.
5. Dissemination of findings
The findings of this study are part of a European project. Findings can be used for conference presentations and publications in academic journals and/or book chapters. ACT takes part in an Open Research Data Pilot (ORD pilot) of the European Commission (Horizon 2020). This implies to make research data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable), available to the public and other researchers through open access repositories. All dissemination of research findings will follow the requirements of the EU legal framework for privacy, data protection and security of personal data. Due to the potentially sensitive nature of the data collected in this survey, any resulting final dataset will not be made public; data and findings might be published in aggregated format only.
6. Feedback
If you wish so, you can receive an electronic copy of any publications resulting of the research conducted in the ACT project. Please send any requests via email to
info@act-on-gender.eu.
7. Complaints
Any complaints regarding the ethical aspects of this study should be directed to the email of the Ethics Committee of the Fundació Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (comite_etica@uoc.edu).
8. Who to contact if you have any questions
If you have any questions about this project, please contact the Coordinator of the ACT project Jörg Müller, at the telephone number (+34) 93 450 5260 or email: jmuller@uoc.edu.
