The STRATEGIC project aims to co-create responsible research and innovation approach that aligns with social-cultural values, principles, contexts, needs and interests in SSA and implement capacity development plans that can strengthen the ethics and regulatory capacity to ensure responsible digital health technologies for clinical research and practice. The project will involve SSA and EU partners and stakeholders and co-create functional resources, such as the STRATEGIC training materials. The urgency of strengthening ethics and legal infrastructure for digital health technologies in SSA is due to the increasing integration of digital technologies into clinical research and practice and the potential negative impacts of these systems on patients, communities and society. While most countries in the Global North have recognised the importance of responsible digital health technologies, the ethics and regulatory capacities for addressing the ethical and legal risks of these technologies are still lacking in SSA. The overarching aim of the STRATEGIC project is to co-create a theoretically strong, empirically supported and widely consulted responsible research and innovation approach and capacity development plan and materials that can strengthen relevant ethics and regulatory institutions for clinical research and practice in SSA. It will identify and map the existing ethical and legal infrastructure in SSA, highlighting the gaps and needs; use these insights to co-create an RRI approach and co-develop and implementing trainings that will also be interested into existing training infrastructure and network. It will also establish sustainable e-community that exist beyond the project. Methodologies to be used include, stakeholder engagement and co-creation strategies such as focus groups, consensus workshops and roundtable discussions.

Different "machines of trust" in science have been identified in the literature: research ethics, research integrity, science communication, benefit sharing and technology assessment. Previous EU funded projects have focused on particular actors of the trust in science ecosystem (e.g. scientists, research funding organisations, research ethics committees) to explore the impact of particular "machines" (e.g. science communication, research ethics). VERITY goes beyond the state of the art by conceptualising "stewards of trust" as the actors of the ecosystem that are responsible for upholding societal trust in science and facilitating science-society co-creation, either this refers to formally responsible organisations like research funding organisations and higher education institutions, or it refers to de facto responsible organisations like social media companies and video streaming platforms which influence societal perceptions of science and innovation. VERITY combines multidisciplinary expertise, both from the social sciences and engineering, to synthesise existing knowledge to evaluate tools and methods for enhancing trust in science through original research and small-scale participatory activities, before producing the VERITY Protocol of Recommendations for "stewards of trust". VERITY brings forward interdisciplinary expertise to perform network analysis and execute interventions on social media, to validate the VERITY Protocol and alleviate practical barriers for its uptake in practice by different stakeholders. VERITY findings will be widely disseminated to different "stewards of trust", such as policymakers, research funding and performing organisations, higher education institutions and other research and innovation actors, to enhance societal trust in science and facilitate science-society co-creation.

The Path2Integrity project is a two-component coordination and support action to enhance research integrity culture. Path2Integrity develops and fosters role-models and rotatory role-plays for adolescents. A Path2Integrity campaign on scientific facts about research integrity and role-models, raises awareness on research integrity within secondary schools and universities. Complementary a Path2Integrity handbook of instructions, which contains vivid stories on research integrity and rotatory role-playing as primary dialogical exercise increases students’ ability to reason on the acceptance or rejection of norms in research integrity. Partners from the Consortium have award-winning experience in creating those settings, which allows Path2Integrity to work with already in existence and successful educational practices. Taking into account that different disciplines and different schools of thoughts are involved, the Consortium takes paramount importance, to ensure explicitly that the Path2Integrity handbook and campaign are based on optimal and systematic evidence-based decisions. Therefore, the key concept of the Consortium is the development of practical educational knowledge. The Consortium will train at least 150 disseminators in the consortiums countries and beyond, and additionally foster the campaign (fact sheets, infographics, flyers, posters, brochures) in at least 15 European countries to enable awareness-raising in different educational organizations (schools and universities).

TechEthos will reinforce the pivotal role of the European Union as an ethics trailblazer in new and emerging technologies. Such technologies bring with them new ethical challenges and societal consequences that need to be addressed. The project will develop guidance for the development and deployment of these technologies to ensure the highest ethical standards at the EU and international levels. It will carry out a horizon scan to identify three or four new technologies with high socio-economic impact. It will then identify and analyse the ethical issues raised by the selected technologies and explore the views and attitudes of expert and lay stakeholders towards them and their ethical implications using scenarios and media analysis. Public involvement is key in this project: science museums and centers involved in our work will ensure appropriTechEthos will address the growing ethical challenges and expectations vis-à-vis new technologies to ensure the highest ethical standards at the EU and international levels. It will conduct a horizon scan of emerging technologies with high socio-economic impacts to identify 3-4 that may raise particularly challenging ethical issues; these will be further analysed and engaged with in the project (via ethical and legal analysis and stakeholder engagement activities). The project will develop/refine/extend (as desirable and applicable to the selected technologies) existing/proposed ethics frameworks, operational guidelines or Codes (e.g., developed in SIENNA, SHERPA, PANELFIT, SATORI and other projects) to enable the effective ethics governance of the technologies. It will reconcile the needs of research and innovation and the legitimate concerns of the society while stimulating innovation and reducing socio-economic inequalities. To do so, it will especially engage with researchers and innovators, research ethics committees (RECs), research integrity (RI) bodies, civil society organisations (CSOs), policy-makers and the public.

The Objective of Ethna System is to develop and implement an Ethics Governance System for grounding good practices in RRI (ETHNA System) in Higher Education, Funding and Research Centres (HEFRCs). The Project will implement and validate a new formal organizational structure within the management structure in 6 different HERCs of the consortium from 6 countries and 3 type of contexts: 2 universities, 2 funding research centres and 2 technological parks in ES, NO, EE, BG, AT and PT. The ETHNA System is composed by an Ethna office (integrity office) and 4 tools and work methodologies for RRI (ethical code, ethics committee, ethical hotline and process indicators to report) that implied institutional changes to respond to ethical challenges that HEFRCs are facing in EU context nowadays in its R&I activities. The institutional changes will be sustainable beyond the lifetime of the project funding because will be implemented and institutionalised in the HEFRCs management structures throughout the Ethna office. A Sustainability Plan will be developed to maximise the impact during 5 years after the end of the project. Therefore, the development of the project will involve a mutual learning among the consortium partners which have different level of expertise and knowledge in the five dimensions of RRI (research ethics and integrity, gender equality, open science, citizen’s engagement). Consortia will contribute to 22 MoRRI indicators and 7 SDG goals (16 targets). GOV2 and GOV3 indicators are particularly focused with KPI project indicators. The process to define ETHNA System is based on Quadruple Helix Mode (QHM) where the involvement of all stakeholders in R&I and the implementation of the ETHNA System and its institutionalization require a sustainable engagement with citizens and society as a whole. Moreover, ETHNA System includes the evaluation of the activities in order to communicate with transparency and publicity its achievements and points of improvement.