Research Principles

The mission of the Expert Council on Integration and Migration is to provide independent, research-based and actionable policy advice on integration and migration. The Expert Council’s scientific staff, who are based in its Berlin Office, both support and complement its work through applied research projects. Members of the scientific staff are guided in their work by, among other things, the Code of Conduct Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice published by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in September 2019. They have also developed their own “Standards for Good Scientific Practice Applicable to the Work of the Expert Council”. Key principles include disclosing research results and providing access to those research results and the data sets on which they are based.

• As a publicly funded institution which provides research-based policy advice, the work of the Expert Council must be transparent and its results must be published. All studies and expert reports by members of the Expert Council’s scientific staff are therefore published.
• The results of research projects are generally published as part of the Expert Council’s own publication series. These are available free of charge (Open Access) in electronic form on the Expert Council’s website.
• Members of the scientific staff are also required to apply the goals of Open Access to other subsequent publications in external media.
• For reasons of transparency, interoperability of research and reusability, wherever possible the Expert Council’s scientific staff submit their research data and key materials on which a publication is based to recognised archives and repositories. Following completion of each project, newly collected data in particular are always to be made available for use by other scientists via a research data centre. The Expert Council hereby applies the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable).
• Studies, policy briefs and other working papers which are the result of research done by the Expert Council’s scientific staff cite the names of the authors and thus do not reflect the opinions of the Expert Council. Each list of authors adequately reflects their actual involvement and contribution.