Abstract

The paper focuses on safety of the researcher as an ethical issue from the perspective of a liaison between international and national, i.e. Lithuanian documents. Review of the academic literature on the topic suggests that its topicality is controversial both from a theoretical and an empirical viewpoint. Notwithstanding, review of the scarce resources suggests that two forms of risks (i.e. psychological and physical) for researchers and three types of coping strategies (i.e. based on individual researcher’s responsibility, organization’s responsibility and a combination of individual researcher’s and organization’s responsibility) can be identified. The fact that the topic of the researcher’s safety can be found as a separate issue related to research ethics among the EU legal documents indicates the reaction of the EU bodies to the prevalent concern in research. However, content analysis of the selected EU documents (i.e. directives) demonstrates that direct references to scientific activities are very scarce in these documents and their relation to scientific research can be found either in range of a very specific research and/ or equating the researcher to any worker. Moreover, the fields of research are limited to natural and medical sciences and the above mentioned forms of risks (which are more usual in research of social sciences) are not noticed in the documents, despite all the above mentioned strategies of coping with the risks can be identified in the documents. Analysis of Lithuanian laws directly related to the EU documents provides rather similar results: the references to scientific activities are scarce; the documents cover just very specific fields of science, and organizations and institutional bodies are denoted as responsible for coping with the issue.