Report: NIH, NASA Restrict Co-Authoring With Foreign Scientists

May 22, 2026

NIH and NASA are targeting co-authorship between domestic and foreign scientists.

Bill Clark/CQ–Roll Call Inc./Getty Images

The National Institutes of Health and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are targeting collaborations between U.S. scientists and foreign researchers, Science reports.

The journal wrote that NIH officials are telling individual grantees to request advance permission for “co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States” and ordering them to remove from annual progress reports to NIH any publications that include “co-authors affiliated with foreign institutions if NIH had not previously approved a foreign component for the grant.” Science said the forbidden partners could even include foreign students working in the U.S. and scientists who left the country after the research.