Cape Town statement on research partnerships between the global north and south will highlight unethical practices and offer advice to scientists.
Researchers at the seventh World Conference on Research Integrity, in Cape Town, South Africa, have been hammering out the equity issues plaguing science partnerships that span the global north–south divide.
This statement from the seventh World Conference on Research Integrity, in Cape Town, South Africa provides guidance for collaborations between researchers in the Global North and South. Hopefully, this will mitigate some of the power imbalance and improve appreciation for the realities of conducting research in less affluent contexts. We have included links to six related items.
The statement will offer guidance on how researchers from low- and middle-income countries can become equal partners in international projects. The organizers hope that having a set of principles for fair and equitable partnerships will help scientists from the global south to speak out against unfair practices. These include not being properly credited or pursuing research questions imposed by collaborators from the global north that do not benefit local communities.
Although not all international collaborations are problematic, unfair and inequitable practices are rife, says Lyn Horn, who heads the office of research integrity at the University of Cape Town. She is formulating the statement together with a group of researchers and ethicists. “Even people and funders with very good intentions perhaps don’t understand how entrenched some of their practices and processes are,” she says.