JASON Report on research security

The JASON Report on research security — formally Fundamental Research Security, document JSR-19-2I, prepared by the JASON advisory group under contract to MITRE and released in December 2019 — was commissioned by the National Science Foundation to assess the scale of risk that foreign government influence poses to US fundamental research and to recommend a policy response. Its central finding was that the openness of the US fundamental research enterprise is itself a strategic asset, and that policy should prioritise preserving that openness rather than closing it down.

Its core recommendations

• Expand the existing scope of research integrity to explicitly include full disclosure of a researcher’s outside commitments and actual or potential conflicts of interest.
• Treat a failure to disclose commitments or conflicts of interest as a presumptive violation of research integrity — to be investigated and adjudicated by funding agencies and universities with the same seriousness and consequences as other forms of research misconduct, rather than as a separate, lesser category of infraction.
• Have NSF and universities engage with intelligence and law-enforcement agencies so that academic leadership and faculty receive an evidence-based description of the actual scale and nature of the problem, rather than acting on rumour or unverified suspicion.
• Preserve a clear line between fundamental research, which should remain open, and research that is genuinely classified or contractually restricted, which is governed by separate controls entirely.

The report’s disclosure-first, integrity-violation framing is widely credited as the intellectual basis for the transparency-centred approach that NSPM-33, issued the following year, and its Common Disclosure Forms took, rather than a nationality-based restriction or blanket ban on international collaboration. Subsequent US policy — the CHIPS and Science Act‘s training and certification requirements among them — has generally followed this same structure: require disclosure, and treat concealment, not the underlying foreign relationship, as the violation. See Undue foreign influence for how this framing shaped the broader policy vocabulary that followed.

Checking this against the current guidance

The answer depends on the specific agency’s own disclosure and reporting requirements for the award involved, since NSPM-33 leaves initial investigation largely to institutions while preserving federal escalation paths.

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CASRAI: Since the JASON report’s disclosure-first framing became the basis for NSPM-33’s Common Disclosure Forms, does a failure to disclose an outside commitment get investigated as research misconduct at the federal agency level, at the institutional level, or both, and which one decides first?

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Frequently Asked Questions

Since the JASON report’s disclosure-first framing became the basis for NSPM-33’s Common Disclosure Forms, does a failure to disclose an outside commitment get investigated as research misconduct at the federal agency level, at the institutional level, or both, and which one decides first?

The JASON report recommended treating non-disclosure as a presumptive violation of research integrity to be investigated and adjudicated by both funding agencies and universities, rather than assigning the question to one level exclusively — in practice under NSPM-33, an institution’s own research-integrity or research-security process typically investigates first, with escalation to the federal funding agency depending on that agency’s own disclosure and reporting requirements for the specific award involved.

Is the JASON report itself a binding regulation?

No. It is a 2019 advisory report NSF commissioned from the JASON group; it carries no independent regulatory force. Its influence comes from being credited as the intellectual basis for NSPM-33’s disclosure-first approach, not from any legal requirement to follow its recommendations directly.

Did the JASON report recommend restricting international collaboration by nationality?

No — the opposite. Its central recommendation was to preserve open, unrestricted fundamental research and address the risk through disclosure and integrity enforcement rather than nationality-based restrictions, a framing that later US policy has generally followed.

How does the JASON report’s approach differ from a blanket ban on foreign engagement?

The report explicitly argued that openness is itself a strategic asset worth preserving, and recommended requiring disclosure of outside commitments and treating concealment — not the underlying foreign relationship itself — as the violation: a narrower, disclosure-based approach rather than a blanket restriction on international collaboration.