The article presents academics’ perceptions on research integrity and teaching integrity and ethics. The empirical basis of the article is a qualitative analysis of data based on open questions from two online surveys conducted among scientists, academic teachers and students. We point out two ways of defining scientific integrity: (1) as a common challenge for the academic community arising from the relationship between science and society; (2) as an individual choice and one’s capital in achieving scientific success. We describe the respondents’ views on the process of teaching integrity and ethics, rooted in a values-based approach to integrity. In this approach, teaching is open to the use of dialogical methods and takes into account the relative nature of the subjects being taught – research integrity and ethics. In our analyses, we focus on a positive approach to research integrity and show that it has great potential to raise the awareness of the scientific community about the principal values in science.