The Role of Research Funders in Promoting Ethical International Health Research Collaborations

International health research collaborations (IHRCs) between High Income countries (HICs) and Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) are essential in global health research, yet ethical challenges including the inequitable sharing of rewards and burdens among the research actors remain insufficiently addressed. We explored the notices of funding opportunities and official guidance documents of three major research funders to assess how funding agencies structure and promote the ethical conduct of IHRCs.

We conducted a content analysis of publicly available notices of funding opportunities and official guidance documents from the National Institutes of Health, European Commission, and Wellcome Trust. Using a structured data collection instrument, we cataloged content within the notices related to equitable data sharing, scientific capacity development, authorship, and intellectual property ownership.

We reviewed 21 International Health Research Collaboration (IHRC)-related documents issued between 2017 and 2021. Documents reviewed included funding opportunity announcements, grant compliance documents, and funders' code of ethics. While all three funders had general provisions for data sharing, none had guidelines specific to data management within IHRC context including the potential use of data for secondary purposes without the prior consent of researchers in LMICs. Although all funders had general guidelines on the ownership of results, guidelines specifying the distribution of ownership rights among HIC and LMIC collaborators were absent. Specific guidelines on how researchers in LMICs and HICs would benefit from each other's expertise as well as authorship guidelines within the IHRC context were absent from all funder's notices of funding opportunities.

Guidelines that promote ethical conduct of IHRCs were absent from documents reviewed from the three top funders of global health research. Development and inclusion of such guidelines in funding announcements could promote ethical IHRCs.