ENRIO

ENRIO, the European Network of Research Integrity Offices, is a network of national bodies, not a single investigatory or standards-setting authority in its own right, and that structural point is the key difference from ORI in the US: ENRIO has no case jurisdiction, no power to investigate an allegation, and no sanction authority, because it is not itself a research-integrity office — it is an association of the national and cross-institutional offices that are, one of which is UKRIO in the UK.

ENRIO was founded in 2008, shortly after the first World Conference on Research Integrity (Lisbon, 2007), and became a formally constituted non-profit association under Belgian law in 2020, headquartered in Brussels and governed by a Board and General Assembly drawn from its member offices. As of its most recently published figures it comprises 27 member organisations spread across 21 countries — a mix of national research-integrity offices, ombuds-style bodies, and equivalent bodies, whose own individual powers vary considerably by country: some member offices are purely advisory, similar to UKRIO; others sit closer to a national funding or academic body with narrower statutory hooks of their own. ENRIO’s membership does not standardise those national powers — it coordinates practice across offices that continue to operate under whatever authority their own country’s system gives them.

ENRIO’s actual activities are coordination and capacity-building: exchanging information and case experience between national offices, sharing good practice in handling misconduct allegations and raising awareness, providing training and education in research integrity, and, notably, supporting countries that do not yet have a national research-integrity structure in setting one up. It publishes joint statements on shared positions (for example, on AI-generated content and authorship) and works with organisations such as ALLEA, author of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, and the organisers of the World Conference on Research Integrity.

The practical upshot for a researcher or institution operating across European jurisdictions: ENRIO is the right place to find which national office covers a given country and to see shared European-level positions, but a live case is always handled at the national-office or institutional level under that country’s own rules, not by ENRIO centrally — the same institutional-responsibility pattern as the UK’s UKRIO/Concordat model, replicated, with real variation, country by country. See CASRAI’s institutional vs. federal jurisdiction in research misconduct guide for the fuller comparison against the US’s centralised ORI model.