There is a growing interest and movement toward restructuring global health, and greater representation of indigenous researchers and knowledge systems [9, 10]. A prominent target for reform is the system for research funding and awarding of research grants which favors HIC researchers and perpetuates power asymmetries in collaborative research projects [6]. Currently, there are calls to increase the allocation of funding to researchers in LMICs [6]. While this is welcome, the current mechanism for awarding grants which relies on excellence as an indicator of who should be funded also creates scenarios where research funding is concentrated in a few countries which have the capacity and established track record of research excellence including publications and authorship, about six of the 54 African countries [10]. It has been recommended that apart from excellence, equity should also be taken into account for external research funding programs to help lift countries that have not been competitive and spur those that have been competitive to greater capacity building [10].

African countries should take a leading role to fund local research and live up to spending 1% of gross domestic product (GDP) on research and development [5]. If this commitment were honored, it would increase local research capacity, reduce dependence on external research funding and help address the inequalities in global health research. However, most countries have not met this pledge [5]. For example, the NCST in Malawi provides research funding opportunities through the small grants schemes. However, the total budget available falls far short of 1% of GDP. The interventions proposed to restructure global health may take time to produce change. Until then, local research institutions need to step up to ensure fairness in collaborative research authorship.

We propose establishing offices of research integrity within the existing regulatory and oversight bodies and mandating them to promote equitable recognition of research partners in authorship as an act of research integrity and where necessary, investigate incidents of research misconduct, where authorship allocation does not recognize local researchers. Furthermore, these offices should be empowered to implement corrective and preventive measures such as developing guidelines to mandate that in collaborative research done in Malawi, the first and/or last authorship roles should be shared equitably among research partners depending on the preference or order of seniority in the research team and/or according to journal specification. This is important because while general research guidelines have been developed, none specifically relate to authorship. As part of the research approval process, this requirement could be an agreement made before study initiation and documented as part of the protocol submission to the research ethics committees to add further weight to the importance of such considerations.

There are potential challenges to implementing offices of research integrity including the need to recruit and train staff, the need for institutional buy-in from leadership and funding. However, one way of mitigating these challenges would be to utilize the same personnel involved in research ethics, approval and monitoring to take up the role of promoting research integrity. For example, compliance officers who conduct monitoring of research studies could also be trained to be research integrity officers. This would reduce costs related to hiring new staff and would encourage support from leadership.