The TRUST Code — full title A Global Code of Conduct for Equitable Research Partnerships — is a set of ethics principles for cross-border research collaboration, published in May 2018 under the name Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings and renamed the TRUST Code at a UNESCO reception in 2024. It was produced by the EU Horizon 2020-funded TRUST project, led by Professor Doris Schroeder at the University of Central Lancashire, and its stated purpose is to prevent “ethics dumping” — the practice of exporting research conduct to a lower-resource setting that a researcher’s home institution or funder would not permit at home.
This guide focuses specifically on what the TRUST Code says about authorship and credit in international, and particularly North-South, research partnerships. It is a companion to CASRAI’s guides on the Cape Town Statement on authorship equity and parachute science — three distinct but overlapping efforts to fix the same underlying problem: researchers and institutions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) doing substantial work on a study without receiving proportionate authorship credit.
A note on the name: this is not the “TRUST Principles” for data repositories
Readers researching data stewardship may already be familiar with the TRUST Principles for digital repositories (Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability, Technology), a 2020 framework used in FAIR data and repository certification contexts. The TRUST Code covered on this page is an entirely different standard with a coincidentally similar name: it is a research-ethics code of conduct for equitable partnerships, not a data-repository certification framework, and CASRAI could not verify that “TRUST” in “TRUST Code” is itself an acronym — the Code’s own materials use it as a proper name rather than spelling out constituent words. Don’t conflate the two when citing either one.
Origins and adoption
The TRUST project was funded under EU Horizon 2020 grant agreement 664771. Its two main outputs were the Global Code of Conduct (now the TRUST Code) and the San Code of Research Ethics, developed with the South African San Council to govern research involving that community specifically. The Global Code of Conduct itself was completed in May 2018 (DOI: 10.48508/GCC/2018.05) and adopted by the European Commission in August 2018 as a mandatory reference document for Horizon 2020-funded research. It has also been adopted by the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), which funds clinical research conducted jointly by European and African institutions.
The Code is organized around four core values rather than a taxonomy of roles: Fairness, Respect, Care, and Honesty. Authorship and credit fall under the Code’s fairness provisions, alongside data ownership, intellectual property, and benefit-sharing — the Code treats authorship as one expression of a broader fairness obligation between research partners, not a standalone editorial policy.
What the TRUST Code says about authorship
The Code’s relevant article states that local researchers should be included, wherever possible, throughout the research process — explicitly naming study design, study implementation, data ownership, intellectual property, and authorship of publications as the dimensions on which that inclusion should happen. The logic is sequential: a partner who is genuinely involved in designing and implementing a study, not just collecting samples or administering surveys under someone else’s protocol, has a much stronger claim to co-authorship under criteria like ICMJE’s than a partner brought in only for fieldwork logistics. The Code’s authorship provision is therefore less a bright-line credit rule and more a call to structure the collaboration itself — from the design stage onward — so that local partners are positioned to meet standard authorship criteria rather than being added or omitted as an afterthought.
Two related provisions bear directly on how authorship and credit disputes get avoided in practice:
- Material and knowledge transfer: the Code calls for formal agreements governing the transfer of material or knowledge to researchers, on terms co-developed with the resource custodians or knowledge holders — relevant where biological samples, traditional knowledge, or local datasets cross institutional or national lines before a manuscript is drafted.
- Benefit-sharing: the Code calls for a culturally appropriate benefit-sharing plan, agreed by all relevant stakeholders and reviewed regularly as the research evolves, in recognition that the parties negotiating it often hold unequal bargaining power. Authorship credit is one of the benefits such a plan can cover, alongside capacity building, data access, and financial terms.
Because the Code sets values and process obligations rather than a specific credit test, it does not replace the ICMJE authorship criteria that most journals still use to decide who qualifies as an author, and it does not replace CRediT as a way of documenting who did what. It sits upstream of both: a research partnership can apply the TRUST Code’s fairness principles when designing the collaboration, use ICMJE’s four-part test to decide who ultimately qualifies as an author, and use a CRediT contribution statement to record each named author’s specific role.
How the TRUST Code differs from the Cape Town Statement
CASRAI covers both frameworks because research administrators increasingly need to know which one applies to a given collaboration, and they are not interchangeable:
- Scope. The TRUST Code (2018) is a general code of conduct for equitable research partnerships covering authorship as one of several fairness dimensions alongside data ownership, IP, and benefit-sharing. The Cape Town Statement (2023, published in Nature following the 7th World Conference on Research Integrity) addresses authorship specifically and in more detail, naming journal and funder practices that exclude local co-authors as the problem to fix.
- Status. The TRUST Code has formal regulatory weight in one specific context: the European Commission adopted it as a mandatory reference document for Horizon 2020 grants, and EDCTP has also adopted it. The Cape Town Statement is a voluntary, aspirational statement with no funder or publisher mandate behind it.
- Audience. The TRUST Code is addressed to research partnerships and funders structuring a collaboration from the outset. The Cape Town Statement is addressed more directly to journals, editors, and funders reviewing authorship decisions after the fact.
In practice the two are complementary rather than competing: a Horizon Europe-funded partnership with LMIC collaborators may be contractually bound by the TRUST Code’s fairness provisions, while an editor evaluating whether a submitted author list looks right can use the Cape Town Statement’s more specific authorship guidance to ask the right questions. Both sit alongside CASRAI’s guide to parachute science, which defines the pattern — researchers from a high-income country conducting fieldwork in a lower-income setting without meaningful local collaboration or credit — that both frameworks were written to prevent.
What this means in practice for research administrators
- Check the funding terms first. If a collaboration is funded under Horizon Europe (successor to Horizon 2020) or by EDCTP, confirm whether the TRUST Code is incorporated by reference into the grant agreement, since that changes it from good practice to a contractual obligation.
- Build authorship planning into partnership agreements, not just manuscripts. Because the Code frames authorship as downstream of study design and implementation, a research collaboration agreement that specifies local partners’ roles in design and implementation up front does more to secure fair authorship outcomes than trying to resolve credit after data collection is complete.
- Document material and data transfer terms separately from authorship. The Code treats transfer agreements for samples, data, or knowledge as a distinct obligation from the benefit-sharing plan; institutions running multi-site international studies should expect both, not one document covering both.
- Don’t treat the Code as a substitute for ICMJE or CRediT. Editors and administrators still need an explicit authorship criteria check and, increasingly, a contribution statement — the TRUST Code does not specify either mechanism itself.
Frequently asked questions
Is the TRUST Code legally binding?
Not in general. It is binding in the specific sense that the European Commission adopted it as a mandatory reference document for Horizon 2020 (and by extension, EDCTP-funded research), so grant recipients under those programs are expected to comply with it as a condition of funding. Outside that context, it functions as a voluntary ethical code that institutions, journals, or funders can choose to adopt or reference.
Does the TRUST Code replace ICMJE’s authorship criteria?
No. The TRUST Code sets a fairness principle — that local researchers should be positioned to participate in, and be credited for, the full research process — but it does not define a specific authorship test. Most journals still apply the ICMJE criteria to decide who qualifies as an author once a manuscript is drafted.
What is “ethics dumping,” and how does it relate to authorship?
Ethics dumping is the practice of exporting research conduct to a lower-resource setting that would not be permitted, or would be subject to stricter oversight, in the researcher’s home country or institution — the problem the TRUST project was created to address. Authorship exclusion is one recognized form of it: using a local partner’s access, samples, or field labor without extending equivalent recognition or decision-making input.
How is the TRUST Code different from the San Code of Research Ethics?
Both came out of the same EU Horizon 2020 TRUST project, but the San Code of Research Ethics is specific to research involving the South African San community and was developed with the South African San Council; the TRUST Code (Global Code of Conduct) is the general-purpose framework intended for resource-poor research settings broadly.
Where can I read the full text of the TRUST Code?
The current version is published at globalcodeofconduct.org, which also hosts background on how the Code was developed and its adoption history.
