The Cape Town Statement on fairness, equity and diversity in research is a set of 20 recommendations for making international research collaborations more equitable, published as a Nature Comment in March 2023 by the Cape Town Statement Working Group (Lyn Horn, Sandra Alba, Gowri Gopalakrishna, Sabine Kleinert, Francis Kombe, James V. Lavery, and Retha G. Visagie), following the 7th World Conference on Research Integrity (7th WCRI), held in Cape Town, South Africa in May 2022 under the theme “Fostering Research Integrity in an Unequal World.” For research administrators and authors working on cross-institutional or international projects — particularly collaborations between researchers in high-income countries (HICs) and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) — it is one of the few widely-cited frameworks that names authorship exclusion specifically as a fairness and integrity problem, not only an ethics-of-collaboration problem.
What the Cape Town Statement Is
The statement’s preamble states that “unfair and inequitable research practices remain prevalent at all stages of research from proposal development to funding application, data collection, analysis, sharing and access, reporting and translation.” Rather than proposing a single new authorship standard, it sets out 20 recommendations addressed to the full range of research stakeholders — researchers, institutions, funders, journals and publishers, and research integrity offices — organized under five headline themes:
- Diversity and Inclusivity as a pathway to fair practice and attribution
- Fair Practice from conception to implementation
- Mutual Respect as a pathway to trust
- Shared Accountability
- Indigenous Knowledge Recognition and Epistemic Justice
The statement does not carry regulatory force — it is not a funder mandate or a journal policy in itself — but it has been widely cited since 2023 as a reference framework by institutions and funders working on research-equity policy, comparable to how the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) functions as a voluntary reference framework for research-assessment reform rather than a binding rule.
What It Recommends Specifically for Authorship
Several of the 20 recommendations address authorship and credit directly, rather than research equity in general terms. In substance, they cover three related problems:
1. Exclusion of local researchers from authorship
The statement recommends that journals and publishers actively question the practice of excluding local researchers based in LMICs from authorship on papers built from data collected in their countries. This targets a specific, well-documented failure mode: a study is designed and led from a HIC institution, data or samples are collected with the essential involvement of in-country researchers, field staff, or community partners, and the resulting manuscript’s byline includes only the HIC-based team. This is the authorship dimension of what field-based disciplines call parachute science or helicopter research — see that guide for the broader pattern of extraction without collaboration, capacity-building, or credit.
2. Funder-side responsibility, not just journal-side
The statement places explicit responsibility on funders from high-income countries, recommending that HIC funders work to avoid helicopter research by building diversity and local-partnership stipulations into funding calls, and by funding local researchers and institutions directly rather than only routing funds through a HIC lead institution that then subcontracts fieldwork. This matters for authorship in practice because who is funded, and how directly, strongly predicts who ends up positioned to meet ICMJE’s authorship criteria (design, data acquisition/analysis, drafting or substantive revision, and final approval/accountability) rather than being relegated to an acknowledgments line or a minor, non-decision-making role.
3. Power-imbalance awareness across the collaboration
More generally, the statement recommends that all research stakeholders remain aware of potential power imbalances in their collaborations and take active steps to ensure their conduct does not deepen those imbalances, but instead helps redress them. Applied to authorship specifically, this means treating author-order and contribution decisions as something to negotiate deliberately and early — not something that defaults to institutional hierarchy, funding source, or seniority.
How This Relates to CRediT, ICMJE, and COPE
The Cape Town Statement is a fairness-and-equity framework, not an authorship taxonomy or a dispute-resolution process — it works alongside those tools rather than replacing them:
- CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) gives collaborations a shared vocabulary of 14 specific contribution types (Conceptualization, Investigation, Resources, Data Curation, and so on). Explicitly assigning CRediT roles at the point of data collection — not retrospectively at manuscript-writing stage — is one concrete way a research team can operationalize the statement’s authorship recommendations: it creates a documented record of who did what, before institutional hierarchy has a chance to shape who “counts” as an author.
- ICMJE’s four authorship criteria remain the underlying test for who qualifies as an author. The Cape Town Statement doesn’t change that test; it argues that the test should be applied consistently to local collaborators, not waived for HIC-based contributors and applied more strictly to LMIC-based ones.
- COPE’s guidance on ghost authorship and guest/gift authorship addresses misattribution generally. The Cape Town Statement’s contribution is naming a specific, systemic pattern of exclusion — local researchers being effectively “ghosted” off international bylines — that sits inside that same misattribution problem but is driven by resourcing and power imbalance rather than individual misconduct.
Practical Implications for Research Administrators
Because the statement is a set of recommendations rather than a mandatory standard, applying it is mostly a matter of building its principles into agreements and workflows research offices already manage:
- Authorship terms in collaboration agreements or MOUs. Where a project involves a HIC lead institution and LMIC-based partners, some research offices now specify authorship expectations (co-authorship for named local investigators and field leads, or a documented CRediT-role assignment) in the collaboration agreement itself, rather than leaving it to be negotiated informally at submission time.
- Local co-investigator and named-author requirements on funding applications. Several funders have moved toward requiring a named local principal investigator or co-investigator, with real decision-making authority, on grants involving LMIC fieldwork — a funder-side mechanism the statement’s own recommendations point toward.
- Documenting contribution at the point of work, not at manuscript stage. A CRediT-style contribution log kept alongside a data management plan gives a factual record to resolve authorship questions later, rather than relying on memory or institutional seniority once the paper is being drafted.
- Flagging capacity-building and direct funding, not only authorship. The statement’s funder-facing recommendations extend beyond the byline — direct funding to local institutions and genuine capacity-building are treated as part of the same fairness problem as exclusion from authorship.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Cape Town Statement a binding standard?
No. It is a set of recommendations published following the 7th World Conference on Research Integrity, not a regulation, journal policy, or accreditation requirement. Its influence comes from adoption by individual institutions, funders, and journals that choose to reference it in their own equity or authorship policies, comparable to how DORA functions as a voluntary reference framework rather than a law.
Does the Cape Town Statement replace ICMJE’s authorship criteria?
No. ICMJE’s four-part test for who qualifies as an author is unchanged. The Cape Town Statement argues that test should be applied fairly and consistently to researchers in low-resource settings, and that funders and institutions should structure collaborations so local researchers are positioned to actually meet it — not that a different or lower bar should apply.
How is the Cape Town Statement different from addressing parachute science generally?
Parachute science (or helicopter research) is the broader pattern the statement is partly responding to — researchers from well-resourced institutions extracting data or samples from a lower-resourced setting without genuine local collaboration. The Cape Town Statement’s 20 recommendations address that pattern specifically through the lens of research integrity and fairness, with concrete, addressed-to-stakeholder recommendations that include, but aren’t limited to, authorship. See the dedicated guide on parachute science and helicopter research for the wider pattern.
Who published the Cape Town Statement and where can I read the full text?
It was authored by the Cape Town Statement Working Group (Lyn Horn, Sandra Alba, Gowri Gopalakrishna, Sabine Kleinert, Francis Kombe, James V. Lavery, and Retha G. Visagie) and published as a Comment in Nature, volume 615, pages 790–793, on 24 March 2023, following the 7th World Conference on Research Integrity in Cape Town, May 2022. The World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation (WCRIF) hosts guidance and background material on the statement on its website.
Sources
- Horn, L., Alba, S., Gopalakrishna, G., Kleinert, S., Kombe, F., Lavery, J.V., Visagie, R.G., for the Cape Town Statement Working Group. “The Cape Town Statement on fairness, equity and diversity in research.” Nature 615, 790–793 (2023).
- World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation (WCRIF), guidance page on the Cape Town Statement.
