The Missing Stakeholder in Research Integrity Conversations

Part of the Building Better Research Ecosystems series

Research integrity discussions typically focus on three key stakeholders: researchers, research institutions, and journals. Researchers are expected to conduct their work honestly and responsibly. Academic or research institutions are responsible for providing oversight, training, and governance. Journals play a critical role in evaluating, publishing, and correcting the scientific record when concerns arise. These stakeholders are undeniably important. Yet there is another influential actor whose role in shaping research culture often receives far less attention: the funder.

Research integrity conversations often focus on researchers, research institutions, and journals. Yet funding organisations play a significant role in shaping research culture through the incentives, expectations, and partnerships they help create. Is it time to more explicitly include funders in conversations about research integrity?

Funding organisations play a central role in determining which research gets conducted, who conducts it, and how success is measured. Through funding priorities, reporting requirements, grant structures, and evaluation criteria, funders help shape the incentives that influence research behaviour. The conditions attached to funding, and the behaviours they reward or discourage, can influence collaboration long before any integrity concern emerges. In many respects, they are among the most powerful actors within the research ecosystem. Despite this influence, discussions about research integrity rarely examine the role funders may play when integrity-related concerns arise.

This is not to suggest that funders should become investigators, arbitrators, or regulators of every dispute that occurs within a funded project. Research institutions and journals already have established responsibilities in these areas. However, the relative absence of funders from integrity conversations raises an important question: if funding shapes research culture, should funders also have a role in supporting responsible research practices?

Many research integrity concerns do not involve fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism. Instead, they emerge from collaboration challenges, communication failures, power imbalances, unclear expectations, disputes over contributions, disagreements about responsibilities, or simply bad faith. Such concerns may not meet formal definitions of research misconduct, yet they can still have significant consequences for the individuals involved and for trust within research partnerships.

When these situations occur, researchers often find themselves navigating a fragmented system of accountability. Institutions may determine that a concern falls outside their formal procedures. Journals may conclude that the issue does not affect the reliability of the published record. Collaborators may hold differing views about responsibilities or obligations. In some cases, no stakeholder appears to have a clear mandate to address the underlying concern.

This creates an uncomfortable question: when no single organisation takes ownership of a problem, where can researchers turn?

The answer is not necessarily to expand the authority of funders. Rather, it may be to broaden conversations about how funding organisations can contribute to healthier research ecosystems. Funders are uniquely positioned to influence expectations around transparency, collaboration, fairness, and accountability. They can encourage practices that reduce the likelihood of disputes, discourage bad-faith behaviour, and support environments where concerns can be raised constructively. This might include encouraging clear collaboration agreements, promoting transparent authorship and contribution discussions at the outset of projects, supporting equitable partnership principles, or requiring research culture considerations within funded programmes. Where expectations around responsible research are reinforced by both institutions and funding organisations, the incentives to foster a healthy research culture may be stronger.

Preventing integrity challenges is often more effective than responding to them after relationships have broken down, and funders may be well placed to encourage the conditions that make prevention more likely. Increasingly, funders are exploring topics such as research culture, responsible research assessment, equitable partnerships, and inclusive collaboration practices. These developments reflect an understanding that good science depends not only on the quality of data produced but also on the quality of the systems that support its production.

As research becomes increasingly collaborative, international, and interdisciplinary, the challenges associated with governance and accountability are likely to become more complex. Addressing these challenges will require contributions from all stakeholders involved in the research process. If we are serious about strengthening research integrity and improving research culture, it may be time to ask whether funders should be more actively included in these conversations as well.

Perhaps the question is not whether funders should become responsible for resolving research integrity concerns, but whether meaningful conversations about research integrity can ever be complete without considering the role funding plays in shaping research culture.