NIH, NASA Restrict Co-Authoring With Foreign Scientists

The National Institutes of Health and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are targeting collaborations between U.S. scientists and foreign researchers, Science reports.

The journal wrote that NIH officials are telling individual grantees to request advance permission for “co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States” and ordering them to remove from annual progress reports to NIH any publications that include “co-authors affiliated with foreign institutions if NIH had not previously approved a foreign component for the grant.” Science said the forbidden partners could even include foreign students working in the U.S. and scientists who left the country after the research.

In response to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about Science’s reporting, an NIH spokesperson emailed a statement Thursday that referenced just one set of grant programs: the Institutional Development Award (IDeA). NIH’s website says the awards go to Puerto Rico and 23 states that “historically have had low levels of NIH funding.”

“The recent update to IDeA grantees was a clarification of longstanding policy, not a new directive,” the spokesperson said. “IDeA program funding has always been restricted to U.S.-based institutions and entities, with foreign institutions, non-domestic components of U.S. organizations, and all foreign components explicitly prohibited. This reflects Congress’s intent that IDeA funds be used exclusively for research capacity building within the United States—and specifically within eligible IDeA states and territories.”

NIH’s statement didn’t mention any other grant programs or answer multiple written questions.

Citing a director at COGR—an organization that only goes by its acronym and advocates for researchers and universities on the federal level—Science also reported that NASA has told some of the institutions it funds that they might have violated federal law because researchers co-authored papers with scientists who have Chinese institutional affiliations. NASA didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment Thursday.