Our values

Courses that inform, inspire and include

Inclusive courses and an inclusive company

My vision for Cofactor is for us to be an actively anti-racist, feminist company that works towards breaking down the barriers that stop minoritised people from reaching their full potential.

This will always be a work in progress, and I am always looking for ways to improve the way we do things. Here are some things we are doing right now.

Informing accurately

It is crucial for training to provide accurate and up to date information.

We strive to ensure all our training materials are updated regularly and check them carefully.

We encourage participants to write as accurately and clearly as possible in their research papers, without exaggerating or downplaying anything.

How we work for equality

We do our best to make our courses accessible and comfortable for everyone

We will continue to work on identifying and removing barriers due to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, native language, level of English ability, disability or academic title.

Respect

We expect our trainers to treat all course participants and organisers with respect, and ask for them to be respected in return. We try hard to spell and pronounce everyone’s names correctly.

Trainer safety

We decline requests for travel to locations where we feel our trainers wouldn’t be fully safe and equally treated, for example, countries where being a woman, a trans person or a member of a same-sex partnership would endanger them.

Removing discrimination

We work towards removing all discrimination in our training based on gender (male/female/nonbinary,  cis/trans, etc), sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, native language, level of English ability, disability or academic title.

Challenging discrimination

We aim to challenge examples of discrimination or bias if they arise in courses, as far as we are able.

Inspiring researchers towards clarity, openness and rigour

Open science

We encourage researchers to practice open science / open scholarship and publish their research in an open access manner. We discourage over-reliance on any particular impact metric when evaluating research or journals.

Open data

We encourage the publication of all outputs of research to prevent publication bias. This also gives researchers a fuller publication record.

Preprints

We encourage rapid dissemination of all research, including using preprints, especially in urgent fields such as climate and disease.

Supporting researchers

We help researchers with their careers by helping them publish their work as effectively as possible.

Minimising environmental impact

Before Covid we pledged to use low-impact  travel where possible and explore options without flights, such as online training or using a local trainer.

For essential journeys that require a flight, we will charge extra to the client and donate the difference to an environmental charity.

We will continue to offer online training to support researchers we can’t reach in person without significant environmental impact.

Training options