Counselling, coaches and collegiality — how institutions can share resources to promote best practice in science.

In 2018, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands began building a community of data champions across all faculties, from aerospace engineering to technology, policy and management. These champions’ role? To nudge staff and students to manage their research data better. Among other incentives, they can apply for dedicated grants to do so. Imperial College London now shuns journal-based metrics in staff assessment; it relies more on peer judgement of research quality. At Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, all staff sign the university’s code of good governance, agreeing to uphold integrity, impartiality and social responsibility, for example.

These are just three of dozens of efforts we found when investigating how institutions worldwide are working to improve research integrity. They form part of our long-term study on this topic, a project that is funded by the European Commission (see Table S2 in Supplementary information for more examples).

Three years ago, the US National Academy of Sciences called for resources to help research leaders improve scientific integrity in their institutions1. Since we started our study in 2019, we have found that universities can struggle to work out where to start, to think comprehensively and to craft concrete policies and procedures tailored to their needs. One participant told us that institutions “only have bits and pieces — but it needs to be a system”.