Dear colleagues, as announced I have drafted an email to be sent to the complete SPARTA consortium with a reminder to follow the rules of good scientific work. Please check the draft and let me know if this can be sent. Thibaud: please check in particular if 2) is correct, as this is second hand information. Best Michael --- Dear SPARTANs, maybe some of you have already heard, but the European Commission has rejected one of the SPARTA deliverables because "the sources [...] are not properly referenced". The Ethics Committee was asked by the SPARTA coordinator to take a closer look at this. In the meantime, a solution has been agreed for the specific case. However, the ethics committee would like to take the case as an opportunity to remind you of a few things: 1) with the grant agreement, all partners have committed themselves to follow the principles of "The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity“ that includes inter alia rules to avoid plagiarism (including self-plagiarism). https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/hori… 2) the rejection of a deliverable may have financial consequences. The European Commission may withhold the funding that went into the rejected deliverable from the responsible editor (not the contributors). 3) apart from these formal issues it is also expected that each deliverable contains a significiant part of new content and a critical appraisal of elements adopted from other sources. 4) it is currently being discussed (but not yet decided) in the Sparta Executive Board (but not decided yet) whether deliverables should in the future be subject to a similarity check before being submitted to the EC. Best Michael Friedewald for the Ethics Committee