What has been the yield of eight World Conferences on Research Integrity?

My assignment for this commentary was to evaluate the impact of the World Conferences on Research Integrity (WCRI). That is a rather impossible task. Furthermore, I have been an active participant in five and a co-chair of four WCRIs, so I’m not at all an unbiased observer. Consequently, I can merely offer you my personal impressions. For the first three WCRIs I did not attend, I refer to two documents (here and here) written by the founders of the tradition and to the oral history video published in 2019.

The first conference I attended was the 4^th WCRI in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. I immediately liked the vibrant atmosphere and felt welcome in the community. The event had a surprisingly multidisciplinary and multistakeholder character and was clearly not just another research conference. The attitude was open and friendly, with participants actually listening to each other and really interested in an exchange of ideas. This was different from the biomedical conferences I was used to. I gladly accepted the opportunity to organize the 5^th WCRI in Amsterdam in 2017. We wanted to give the emerging research on research integrity a bit more attention and tried to re-establish the tradition to also have high-level politicians on the main stage. The first idea worked well, but the second had mixed results: we had to adapt the conference schedule several times at short notice and most contributions by politicians were frankly quite boring, with the keynote by Naledi Pandor as impressive exception.

The 6^th WCRI in Hong Kong in 2019 was especially successful in engaging scholars and professionals from Asia. We also further strengthened the attention to early career researchers and professionals (ECRPs) in the field, as these colleagues will shape the future of research integrity. The 7^th WCRI was delayed for a year until 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was touching to see how glad the research integrity community was to be able to meet again. Unfortunately many had to attend online due to the fact that international travel was still banned by a number of countries. Having the conference on African soil was an enormous boost for research integrity, both in South-Africa and Africa as a whole. During the 8^th WCRI in Athens in 2024 the tradition of helping first time attenders to feel welcome and supporting ECRPs was further amplified. With the exception of the Middle-East all continents were well represented. After the conference the ECRPs committee started activities for ECRPs between conferences and will expand these over the coming years.

The World Conferences on Research Integrity have to date produced five statements, all named after the city in which the conference at issue was held. The usual approach is that a small group prepares a draft and invites comments from the WCRI community before the conference, organizes two focus track discussions on the updated draft during the conference, formulates the penultimate version, and arranges a final round of comments after the conference. Subsequently the statement is finalized and usually published in a scholarly journal. The series started with the Singapore statement, which lists five principles and fourteen professional responsibilities that are fundamental to research integrity. This timely document has been quite influential and is cited by the large majority of codes of conduct worldwide. In a way it became the informal global code for research integrity. In my view this could happen because it came early and formulated the principles and responsibilities in rather abstract terms. Consequently it was not difficult to position a wide range of local and regional codes as an operationalization of the Singapore statement.

The Montreal statement focussed on research integrity issues in international collaboration. It was an important initiative that nevertheless gained relatively little traction, possibly because it’s rather long and quite specific. The Amsterdam agenda urged for more transparency in research, mainly in terms of open methods and open data. This was meant to make clear that these elements of Open Science are also important for research on research integrity. Sadly this has not been picked up well by the community and abstracts on empirical research presented at the 6^th, 7^th and 8^th WCRI concern registered studies for less than 30%. The frequently cited Hong Kong principles recommends the usage of indicators of responsible conduct of research in researcher assessment. This importantly supplemented the ongoing attempts of reforming researcher evaluation. The Cape Town statement takes a strong stance on the importance of fairness and equity for research integrity, and provides twenty recommendations aimed at various stakeholders. Its publication in Nature gained the statement substantial attention.

The upcoming 9^th WCRI in Vancouver, 3 – 6 May 2026,  will both follow and renew the tradition of former conferences. The envisioned statement will be the Vancouver standard for AI disclosure. Other themes that will get special attention are research safety and indigenous knowledge systems. We’ve been able to recruit Robbert Dijkgraaf as Steneck-Mayer lecturer and we have enlisted a highly interesting and very diverse panel of keynote lecturers. It will again be a very interactive conference for a broad audience, with special events for first-time attenders and ECRPs. The program features seven workshops, seven plenary sessions and nine symposia. Later many posters and oral presentation sessions will be added. I’m confident it will again be an excellent meeting and I hope to see you all in Vancouver.

In summary, in my view the WCRIs fulfil two important roles. First and foremost it’s a platform to meet and exchange ideas for research integrity researchers and professionals from all career stages, disciplinary fields and stakeholder categories. That is important because organizations usually only have one or at most a few employees with a focus on research integrity. The second role concerns providing authoritative guidance and policy recommendations on research integrity. This is embodied in the statements issued over the years and includes the recently established The Lancet and World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation Commission on Research Integrity, which will take a multifactor and multistakeholder approach to work towards solutions that promote the quality and credibility of research.