Research integrity annual statement requirements flow from Commitment Five of the UK Concordat to Support Research Integrity: every signatory employer of research — universities, government departments, and independent research organisations — must publish a short, public annual statement summarising its research-integrity activity and disclosing high-level data on formal misconduct investigations. A research integrity annual statement is a publicly available, governing-body-approved document reporting an institution’s progress against the Concordat’s five principles: honesty, rigour, transparency and open communication, care and respect, and accountability.
- What the Concordat actually requires
- Required sections: what goes in the statement
- How misconduct-case numbers are — and aren’t — disclosed
- Common questions, answered directly
- Best practice: what the Open University does differently
- Implications for research administrators
What the Concordat actually requires
The Concordat to Support Research Integrity was first published by Universities UK in 2019 and revised in 2025. Commitment Five requires signatory organisations to “publish an annual statement” describing how they support research integrity and to include data on formal research misconduct investigations conducted that year.
There is no single legally mandated format. The UK Committee on Research Integrity (UKCoRI) and the Research Integrity Concordat Signatories (RICS) Group commissioned a common template — distributed via the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) as a self-assessment tool — to standardise reporting, but its use remains voluntary. This is why statement quality and completeness still vary sharply across the sector.
Required sections: what goes in the statement
Whether an institution uses the RICS template or writes its own, a compliant statement needs to cover the same ground. The table below maps required content against what the recommended template adds on top of the bare Concordat obligation.
| Section | Required by Commitment Five | Added by the RICS/UKRIO template |
|---|---|---|
| Governance and oversight | Yes — named senior owner | Named committee, reporting line to Council/Senate |
| Culture and training activity | Yes — summary of activity | Structured prompts on induction, CPD, open research training |
| Policies and systems in place | Yes | Cross-reference to ethics review, data management, authorship policies |
| Misconduct investigation data | Yes — numbers required | Standardised categories (plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, other) |
| Reflection and forward plan | Implied (“summary of activities”) | Explicit “next 12 months” section |
| Sign-off and publication | Yes — governing-body approval, public URL | Standard approval statement wording |
Each statement should also name a senior point of contact for research integrity queries — a practice UKRIO’s guidance treats as effectively mandatory even though the Concordat text does not use that word. The statement must be approved by the institution’s governing body and hosted at a stable, publicly accessible URL, since UKCoRI and RICS collect these links centrally each year.
How misconduct-case numbers are — and aren’t — disclosed
Commitment Five requires “data on the number of research misconduct investigations conducted,” but it does not prescribe a taxonomy, a reporting period, or a denominator. In practice this produces wide variation: some institutions report raw investigation counts, others report allegations received versus investigations opened versus proven findings, and a minority report nothing more than a narrative sentence.
UKCoRI’s 2025 review of statements published between 2022 and 2024 — the largest analysis of its kind, following an earlier 2023 review of 280 statements from 2019/20–2021/22 — found that annual statements were available for 78% of institutions for the 2022/23 cycle and 75% for 2023/24, meaning roughly a quarter of signatories had no traceable statement at all in the most recent year reviewed. Where investigation data was reported, the review found the top three cited reasons for misconduct allegations were consistently:
- Plagiarism
- Failure to meet legal, ethical, or professional obligations
- Misrepresentation
Government departments and independent research organisations that sign the Concordat — the UK Health Security Agency and the Ministry of Defence among them — tend to publish shorter, more standardised statements against a customised template, according to UKCoRI’s companion analysis of non-HEI signatories. HEI statements, by contrast, show more variation in depth: the review found monitoring and evaluation of stated activities remains limited even where the narrative content is strong.
Common questions, answered directly
What is the Concordat to Support Research Integrity?
The Concordat to Support Research Integrity is a UK sector agreement, first published by Universities UK in 2019 and updated in 2025, under which signatory universities, funders, and research organisations commit to five principles — honesty, rigour, transparency, care and respect, and accountability — and to publishing an annual statement on their progress.
Is there an official template for the annual statement?
There is a recommended template, commissioned by the RICS Group and distributed by UKRIO as part of a self-assessment tool, but no institution is legally required to use it. Most Russell Group and post-92 universities now use it or a close variant to aid year-on-year comparison.
Who checks whether universities comply with the Concordat?
No single regulator audits compliance. UKCoRI periodically commissions independent reviews — most recently covering statements published 2022–2024 — that assess coverage and quality across the sector, but publication itself is on an honour system enforced by peer visibility rather than sanction.
What counts as research misconduct under the Concordat?
The Concordat frames research misconduct as fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and other serious breaches of the honesty and rigour principles, alongside failures to meet legal, ethical, or professional obligations — the three categories UKCoRI’s analysis found most frequently cited across published statements.
Best practice: what the Open University does differently
Several structural choices separate stronger statements from weaker ones. The Open University is a useful reference point: it names its Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research and Innovation as the explicit institutional point of contact for research integrity matters and as the office responsible for investigating misconduct allegations — addressing the named-contact expectation that many statements leave implicit. It also maintains a public archive of its statements dating back to 2020 at a stable URL, satisfying the transparency and accountability principles beyond the single-year minimum.
Common gaps against this standard include: publishing the statement only internally rather than at a public URL; omitting a named senior contact; reporting a single aggregate misconduct figure with no breakdown by category or outcome; and failing to link the statement back to the institution’s research ethics or authorship policies, which weakens the “systems in place” section that the RICS template expects.
Implications for research administrators
For research administrators, the annual statement is not a compliance afterthought — it is one of the few Concordat-derived documents external funders, publishers, and prospective staff can actually inspect. Institutions that adopt the RICS/UKRIO template structure, publish consistently year-on-year, and disaggregate misconduct data by category give funders and collaborators a materially clearer signal than a narrative paragraph can. As UKCoRI continues its periodic sector reviews, the gap between the roughly three-quarters of institutions with a traceable statement and full sector coverage is likely to remain the most visible measure of Concordat compliance in the years ahead.
Research administration teams building or auditing a statement should also review related governance obligations set out in institutional research administration policy, and consult standard definitions of research-integrity terminology in the CASRAI research dictionary when aligning statement language with sector norms.
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