LINGARAJ COLLEGE,BELAGAVI

Preamble

Reputation of any educational institution depends on scholarship, research productivity and innovation. The success of Institution in attaining its objectives is greatly contingent upon the alignment of the faculty with all the aspects of research initiatives, being undertaken at the Institution. Therefore, the present research policy aims to help Lingaraj College and faculty achieve excellence and contribute to organisations and society.

Objectives

This policy provides a broad framework to guide research and integrity of scholarly inquiry at the Institution. The objectives of policy are as follows:

• To promote research, innovation and intellectual capital.
• To ensure integrity, quality and ethics in research.
• To integrate teaching and research through translational and instructional research.
• To incentivise the generation of intellectual capital.

Promotion of Research

The Institution believes that researchers are free to choose the subject of their research, to seek support from any funding source for their research work, and to report their findings and conclusions. However, research shall be available for scrutiny to the Institution and constructive criticism of peers. Research techniques used by the researchers shall not violate established professional ethics, pertaining to the health, safety, privacy, and other personal rights of human beings or to the infliction of injury or pain on animals.

The Institution shall create conducive environment for research. Due to limited resources, the Institution may not support fully all research likely to be undertaken, but it shall allocate the space, facilities, funding, and other resources for research programmes based on the scholarly and educational merits of the proposed research. It shall also provide development opportunities to researchers for writing research proposals and reports, publications, patent filing, etc.

Research Policy Implementation Mechanism

The Research Advisory Committee of the Institution shall be responsible for implementing this research policy of the Institution by working closely with the management.

The specific roles and functions of the research advisory committee will be as follows:

• Encourage the faculty to undertake Ph.D.
• Facilitate the faculty in undertaking research projects.
• Provide research facilities in terms of laboratory equipment, research journals and research incentives etc. required by the faculty.
• Encourage and promote a research culture (eg. teaching work load remission, opportunities for attending conferences etc.).
• Provide financial assistance for attending and presenting research papers in seminars, conferences, FDP and workshops.
• Encourage the faculty to undertake research by collaborating with other research organizations/ industry.
• Create suitable procedures for giving due recognition for guiding research.
• Facilitate the establishment of specific research units/ centres by funding agencies / university.
• Organize workshops/ training programmes/ sensitization programmes are conducted by the institution to promote a research culture on campus.
• Prepare budgets for supporting students’ research projects.
• Approach National and international organizations such as UGC, CSIR, and ICSSR to fund major and minor research projects undertaken by the faculty.
• Make efforts to improve the availability of research infrastructure requirements to facilitate research.
• Develop and implement an official Code of Ethics to check malpractices and plagiarism in research.
• Facilitate Interdepartmental / interdisciplinary research projects.
• Encourage and promote the publication of research articles by the faculty in reputed/ refereed journals.
• Facilitate the provision consultancy services to industries / Government / Non- Government organizations / community/ public.
• Prepare Rules & Guidelines for Grant of Research related leave and other remissions
• Prepare Guidelines for design and evaluation of curriculum oriented research projects
• Encouraging collaborative research with International/National repute Institutions

Research at UG and PG Level

Teaching and research are equally important in a Institute. To promote creativity among the undergraduate and post-graduate students, some research component in the curricula, especially in the final year of the bachelors programme and final year in the master’s programme, is necessary. Accordingly, in the final year of the bachelors programme the Projects are inducted where the students under the guidance of the faculty work on the decided topic of the dissertation and submit the findings periodically. The final project is submitted to the institution and also the viva is conducted. Similarly, in the postgraduate programme, research was emphasised emphatically and students were trained for robust research skills. The institution shall further reinforce research training in both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the future.

Research Ethics

The Ethics Committee reviews research proposals involving human participants and their data to ensure that they agree with local and international ethical guidelines. It also monitor studies once they begin and if necessary may take part in follow-up actions after the end of the research. The main responsibility is to protect the subjects involved in the study and also consider the possible risks to the community and environment. Ethics committee will have the authority to approve, reject, modify, or stop studies that do not conform to the accepted standards.