Partnerships are essential to deliver research and innovation for global health and partner development. Sustainable Development Goal 17 is all about this. Yet, there is no framework, no benchmark, no standard of best practice on which to model governmental, corporate, non-profit, or academic collaborations, particularly not for international collaborative research and innovation involving low- and middle-income countries. This is where the RFI intends to make a difference: to create a reporting system that encourages governments, business, organisations and funders to describe how they take measures to create trusting, lasting, transparent and effective partnerships in research and innovation.

The Research Fairness Initiative is a reporting initiative. It provides a template for good quality reporting on conditions that countries, research organisations, business and research funders can use to describe what measures they have in place and plan to put in place in future to optimize fair partnerships – i.e. measures that encourage the creation and maintenance of trusting, lasting, transparent and effective partnerships in research and innovation. We prioritize global health, and, in particular, the position of low- and middle-income countries – but the RFI applies in many other settings as well. In fact, given the absolute absence of frameworks and benchmarks for quality and fair partnerships in research and innovation, the RFI will be useful in any situation – even if only as a means to reduce conflict and contract negotiation times!

The global health research and innovation ‘business’ is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, if not more, where most of it is concluded not through single laboratories or individual researchers, but through increasingly complex partnerships that are necessary to deal effectively and timely with increasingly complex, cross-boundary problems. Not just in health, but in environment, food security, urbanization and many other areas where research and innovation is needed to turn challenges into opportunities and solutions. Partnerships are key, and the RFI is a first, global effort to create transparency, accountability and opportunities to develop benchmarks and agree on ‘best practices’ and promote fairness in collaborations.partner The RFI emphasizes sharing all benefits of research to ensure that low- and middle-income countries can ‘catch up’ in global health R&D and become increasingly important contributors to global health, equity and development.

Governance and management of the Research Fairness Initiative are essential to its independence and credibility. In the first phase (start-up), the COHRED Core RFI Team – assisted by a globally representative Technical Working Group (TWG1) – used the extensive inputs from two (soon three) global consultations to create the RFI, the areas for reporting, and the quality standards for certification of reporting. Even in this phase, we realised that independence between standard setting for reporting and certification of reporting is crucial for credibility and impact. We therefore initiated the search and recruitment of a second Technical Working Group (TWG2), which will have much more influence on shaping the RFI development in future. At the same time, we need to balance independence with available financing, which is why we have not set up a separate organisation (yet). Instead, COHRED provides the Secretariat function for the work of the TWG. For now, we propose the following governance and management structure for the Research Fairness Initiative (the diagram to the right). Pending increasing resources, it is anticipated that this structure will create even more ways to ensure independence between income, standard setting and certification.

Proponent: Council on Health Research for Development (COHRED) Supporting Organizations: Philippine Council for Health Research and Development, Nigerian Academy of Science, Kenya Medical Research Institute, Asia Pacific Association of Medical Journal Editors (APAME), Forum for Medical Ethics Society (FMES), India, University of the Philippines System, Turkish Academy of Sciences