Canada's newest medical school is including a strong commitment to academic freedom and research integrity in its by-laws.

"The Northern Ontario Medical School, which will admit its first class of students in 2005, is showing impressive leadership," said James Turk, executive director of CAUT.

According to Turk, credit goes to Roger Strasser, the school's founding dean, and Laurentian University president Judith Woodsworth who, on the urging of Laurentian University Faculty Association president Jean-Charles Cachon, helped ensure language on academic freedom and research integrity was added to the school's by-laws.

"Cachon showed real determination," Turk said. "He felt passionately about the importance of the new institution making a strong commitment to academic freedom and research integrity and helped develop the language. In fact, he used recommendations from The Olivieri Report as the basis for the recommendations on research integrity."

Turk said the importance of getting these statements in the by-laws stems from the fact that the school is a private non-profit corporation which is legally separate from Laurentian and Lakehead universities, to which it is affiliated. As such, the medical school is responsible for establishing its own rules of governance through its by-laws.

On academic freedom, the by-laws state that the institution is dedicated to the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge - specifying that its members enjoy certain rights and privileges essential to these twin objectives: "Central among these rights and privileges is the freedom within the law to pursue what in their opinion are fruitful avenues of inquiry, to teach and to learn in an environment unhindered by external or non-academic constraints, and to engage in full and unrestricted consideration of any opinion."

Academic freedom, under the by-law, "is the freedom to examine, question, teach, and learn, and it involves the right to investigate, speculate, and comment without reference to prescribed doctrine."

The institution pledges to "shield and protect its members from any efforts by the state or its agents, the officers of the Corporation (NOMS) or its agents, its members, private individuals, corporations and other entities to limit or suppress academic freedom."

On research integrity, the by-laws commit to "protecting the integrity of research, to abiding by ethical principles in all its research and to prohibiting conflicts of interest."

The language also covers risks associated with research involving human subjects: "All contracts, protocols or investigator agreements for industrial sponsorship of clinical trials or for participation in such clinical trials shall be deemed to provide that the clinical investigators shall not be prevented by the sponsor or anyone else from informing participants in the study, members of the research group, other physicians administering the treatment, research ethics boards, regulatory agencies and the scientific community, of risks to participants that the investigators identify during the research.

"These provisions also apply to any risks from a treatment so identified following the conclusion of a trial if there are patients being administered the treatment in a non-trial setting. The term 'risk' includes but is not limited to the inefficacy of the treatment and direct safety concerns.

"All contracts, protocols or investigator agreements for industrial sponsorship of clinical trials or for participation in such clinical trials shall reproduce (the) declaration on Integrity of Research and the declaration on Academic Freedom."

The Northern Ontario Medical School will have main campuses in Sudbury and Thunder Bay, with multiple teaching and research sites distributed across Northern Ontario.