Research Security: Protecting Your Work
Learn to navigate the complex world of academic research security, from identifying restricted foreign entities to safeguarding your data against malign influence.
Like Duolingo, but for Research Security: Protecting Your Work. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 9 levels across 2 sections, about 18 minutes end to end, roughly 4 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Identifying Global Risks and Securing the Lab. It starts from scratch.
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Key ideas in Research Security: Protecting Your Work
- Standard collaborations focus on open knowledge sharing and joint publication
- MFTRPs often require the researcher to recruit other students or transfer specific IP to the foreign state
- Legitimate partnerships are usually transparently managed through the home university's office of sponsored programs
- Malign programs use high salaries or 'honorary' titles to buy exclusive access to your time and data
- Contractual clauses that mandate hiding the relationship from your employer are a major red flag for research misconduct
- Academic freedom requires that your primary institution knows where your funding and obligations lie
- Distinguishing between standard international collaboration and MFTRPs
- Identifying the 'quid pro quo' in contracts requiring secrecy
- Shadow labs are used to replicate and 'drain' research progress to a foreign state in parallel with your work
- These setups often bypass safety, ethical, and export control regulations of the home institution
- The goal is often to claim the 'first to publish' or 'first to patent' status for the foreign entity
- Reporting all foreign 'in-kind' support, such as free lab space or equipment, on grant applications
- Why full transparency is the primary legal safeguard
- Dual-use technologies
- Recognizing the risk of 'shadow labs'
- Bypassing peer review with flattery
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Research Security: Protecting Your Work the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
Which of these is a common requirement of a Malign Foreign Talent Recruitment Program (MFTRP)?
Get it right to open this lesson and 8 more in the app.
Where Research Security: Protecting Your Work takes you
- 1
Identifying Global Risks
- Spotting Malign Talent Programs
- Navigating Restricted Entity Lists
- 2
Securing the Lab
- Safeguarding Data with NIST Standards
2 sections · 3 units · 9 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
Research Security: Protecting Your Work is taught in the Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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