Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training

“RCR training” is used loosely to mean any research-ethics instruction, but as a funder compliance category it has a specific, checkable shape: a defined topic list, a minimum dose, a required format, and a recurrence schedule set by the awarding agency rather than by the institution alone. NIH and NSF are the two federal funders with the most developed requirements, and — this is the detail most institutional summaries collapse — their requirements do not match each other closely enough to satisfy with a single generic course.

What the training is expected to cover

NIH’s own guidance (via its institutes, e.g. NIMH’s summary of the requirement) describes RCR instruction as covering: conflict of interest and conflict of commitment; human subjects, animal subjects, and laboratory safety policies; mentor/mentee responsibilities; safe and inclusive research environments free from harassment; collaborative research, including international collaborations; peer review and confidentiality; data acquisition, management, sharing, and recordkeeping; research misconduct policies and procedures; responsible authorship and publication practices; and the researcher’s broader societal responsibilities. NSF’s RECR requirement does not mandate an identical topic list by regulation, but institutions typically use the same or an overlapping curriculum — most commonly delivered through the CITI Program’s RCR/RECR modules — to cover both funders’ expectations in one program.

Who is required to complete it

NIH requires RCR instruction for all trainees, fellows, participants, and scholars supported by an NIH training, career development, research education, or dissertation research award (including NRSA awards, mentored K awards, and R25/R36 grants), per Notice NOT-OD-10-019: a minimum of eight contact hours, with substantial face-to-face or real-time discussion as the key feature — online-only instruction alone does not satisfy it — required at least once during each career stage and no less than once every four years.

NSF’s Responsible and Ethical Conduct of Research (RECR) requirement, under the America COMPETES Act, originally covered only undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers supported on NSF awards. The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act expanded it to cover faculty and other senior personnel as well, effective July 31, 2023. Unlike NIH, NSF does not mandate a specific format, contact-hour minimum, or in-person component — training format is left to the institution, and online modules alone are commonly accepted.

NSF also maintains a separate, newer Research Security Training and certification requirement (training effective October 10, 2025; certification effective December 2, 2025). It is a distinct obligation from RECR, not a renamed or expanded version of it, and covers foreign-influence and research-security topics rather than the core RCR curriculum above.

Typical formats

Institutions commonly combine (a) online, self-paced modules — most often through the CITI Program, which offers RCR and RECR course tracks referenced by both NIH- and NSF-funded institutions — with (b) live discussion sessions, seminars, or coursework where a funder (currently NIH) requires face-to-face or real-time interaction rather than self-paced study alone.

A real gap CASRAI’s infrastructure is positioned to address

There is currently no standardized, machine-readable way to express a claim like “person X completed RCR requirement Y as of date Z” in a form that travels with a researcher across institutions and funders — a genuine practical problem on multi-institution collaborative awards, where each partner institution’s research office may track completion in a different system with no shared record format. ORCID’s “qualification” affiliation type and the CERIF person-record model used in CRIS systems are plausible building blocks for representing this kind of credential, but neither currently constitutes an existing, adopted solution — it is an open interoperability gap, not a solved problem, and one that sits squarely at the intersection of research-integrity compliance and the persistent-identifier/CRIS infrastructure CASRAI’s Dictionary already maps.

For funder-by-funder requirement detail and the operational question of how institutions track completion across systems, see the fuller guide, Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Training: Requirements and How Completion Gets Tracked.