Our values
Courses that inform, inspire and include
Inclusive courses and an inclusive company
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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.
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
Supporting researchers
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.
