Open Science, Ethics & Data Protection

Ethics built into the method.

Residua treats openness, integrity, and the protection of people and the record as conditions of good research, not as afterthoughts. These commitments are designed to meet the standards of the European Research Council and Horizon Europe.

Open access

The Institute commits to open-access publication of its research outputs, in line with European funder requirements, so that findings are available to scholars and the public without barriers.

Research data management

Each project maintains a data management plan covering how data is generated, documented, stored, shared, and preserved, with full provenance metadata for every sample and dataset.

Research integrity

We uphold recognised standards of research integrity: honesty, rigour, transparency, and accountability, with clear authorship and conflict-of-interest practices.

Data protection & GDPR

Any identifiable modern personal data is handled under the GDPR, with particular care for special-category data. Processing is lawful, minimised, and documented.

Research ethics

Research involving people, communities, and cultural heritage follows standard ethics protocols, including informed consent, community engagement, and appropriate approvals.

Responsible AI

We develop AI transparently and interpretably. Models externalise the step from signal to claim so that each inference is auditable, contestable, and open to revision.

A worked commitment

Excluding what should not be inferred

Methodological choices carry ethical weight. In our flagship programme, social inference maps chemical proxies onto variables such as migration status, socioeconomic position, region, and diet, at the population level and with stated assumptions.

Racial categories are deliberately excluded from the pipeline, consistent with French statistical law and GDPR special-category protections. This is an example of how we build constraints into the method itself.

See the pipeline

Governance layer

A governance layer runs across every stage of our research: data management, GDPR handling of identifiable modern data, heritage data governance, and community engagement. Ethics is part of the design, not an appendix to it.

Questions about our practices?