Equitable research is not rocket science

13 July 2026
Equitable research partnerships
kant
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In this op-ed, Doris Schroeder argues that equitable research partnerships do not require ever more technical rules, but clear, accessible ethics grounded in fairness, respect, care and honesty. Drawing on the development of the TRUST Code, she reflects on how international research can move beyond exploitation and towards genuinely equitable collaboration. 

Equitable research partnerships in international research are key to addressing humanity’s challenges, and the ethics of equitable partnerships is not rocket science. Eight years ago in the European Parliament, the TRUST team launched the short and jargon-free TRUST Code. The code has since been adopted around the world, including by the European Research Council. 

When ethics feels more complex than it should 

Have you had training on GDPR compliance? For instance, what information must you provide on an informed consent form to be legally compliant? Or on how to prevent scientific misconduct by avoiding p-hacking (the misuse of data analysis), HARKing (hypothesising after the results are known), and selective reporting?  

German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) believed that rational human beings can easily distinguish between what is morally right and what is morally wrong. They do not always act upon reason, but they do know. Kant would probably be very surprised to hear that ethical conduct in research today requires in-depth and recurrent training to keep up with all the requirements. And to a rational person, these requirements may not appear to be intuitively accessible either.  

For instance, 80 people might very happily assemble in front of a photographer for a posed organisational photo. However, without 80 signed media release forms, this photo could not be published on most websites. A Kantian might reasonably ask: If somebody did not want to be publicly identifiable in a photo, why would they step into a group photo and then rely on refusing to sign a media release form to prevent later publication?  

Ethics requirements do not have to be contrary to rational intuitions, of the type that Kant believed are available to all human beings because of their faculty of reason.  

The TRUST Code 

In 2018, the TRUST Code was released in the European Parliament. The TRUST Code – A Global Code of Conduct for Equitable Research Partnerships is one of four codes in the TRUST Family of Ethics Codes. All four have six features in common: 

  1. They are short.  
  1. They are non-technical, i.e. they do not use any jargon.  
  1. They apply to all research disciplines.  
  1. They are based on moral values that resonate around the world, namely fairness, respect, care and honesty.  
  1. They have a specific, targeted purpose, for instance, in the case of the TRUST Code, to guide equitable research partnerships in international, collaborative research.  
  1. They can be used directly by the people who might be exploited in research, even if they are highly impoverished, disadvantaged or not well educated.  

As the name indicates, the TRUST Code supports equitable research partnerships. It also tries to prevent ethics dumping, the opposite of equitable research partnerships. A term coined by the European Commission for a funding call in 2013, ethics dumping warns against exporting unethical research practices from higher to lower-income countries, where ethics governance mechanisms might be underfunded or under-regulated.  

What ethics dumping looks like 

Examples of ethics dumping are still manifold in the 21st century. The following real-life examples all involve researchers from the Global North undertaking research in the Global South.  

  • Undertaking social science research amongst Ebola survivors without ethics approval and then seeking retrospective approval when realising that publication of findings requires approval.   
  • Refusing to pay compensation for serious adverse events during a trial.  
  • Using a placebo as a control in medical research instead of locally available care.   
  • Considerable financial profiteering from samples exported without local benefit sharing.  
  • Bypassing community approval from an Indigenous group and restricting consent to video recordings of just four illiterate, highly impoverished participants.  
  • Exporting non-human primate research that is prohibited in Europe to a country with lower animal welfare regulations.  
  • Undertaking patronising research to ‘benefit’ a lower-income country without any local collaboration and wasting considerable resources in the process.  

These examples, published in a short book, are mostly from medical sciences because these are most likely to be made public. Other inequities may be less noteworthy to media outlets, but they can have serious detrimental impacts on trust and collaborative working. For instance: 

  • Research participants and their communities may take part in research but never hear about the outcomes. 
  • Researchers from the Global South may be given only menial roles in international projects and may not even be included as co-authors or co-presenters, despite collecting the data and establishing the local connections. 
  • Ethics committees in lower-income settings may face committee “shopping”, whereby researchers from higher-income settings try several committees until they find the one whose requirements are the least onerous. 
  • Principal investigators may bring entire teams to lower-income settings and only involve locals for translation services. 

Uptake and influence 

How ethics guidance is developed is almost as important as what is developed. Importantly, rather than being based purely on drafter views, the TRUST Code is based on a major analysis of the exploitation risks that arise in international, collaborative research. It was also co-drafted with marginalised populations who have significant experience of exploitation. 

Together with the European Commission (EC) and the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership, the European Research Council (ERC) was the first adopter of the TRUST Code in 2018. Following its adoption by the EC and the ERC, other high-profile organisations have joined the TRUST Family in promoting equitable research partnerships. These include publishers such as Nature and SAGE; national research funding councils in the Netherlands, Poland and Estonia; NGOs from Europe, Africa and Asia; and network associations like the Pasteur Network and the American Geophysical Union. Together, they are bringing fairness, respect, care and honesty – the core values of the TRUST Code – into international research.  

"The first reader of the German translation was my father (at the time, a 78-year-old, retired chartered accountant). His immediate reaction was: “Isn’t that happening anyway?” He thought that the ethics requirements of the TRUST Code were obvious. Immanuel Kant would have been pleased." 

For free, interactive TRUST Code Training of one hour, see here: 

Doris Schroeder is Professor of Moral Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Professional Ethics at the University of Lancashire, and the lead author of the TRUST Code