An ethical scheme for internal research grant allocation in a democratic university

Purpose: Recently, public funding for Universities declined worldwide with universities seeking additional funding from external sources. Foundations responsible for the management of such funds have been established within universities in order to guarantee high levels of transparency when distributing them to labs, in the form of internal grants.

Methods: But how could a university establish an ethically just way of allocating such grants?

Results: In this paper we show that by assigning different relative weight coefficients to different ethical theory arguments a consensus for the allocation of funds to research labs can be reached, in line with the university’s overall vision on research.