JASON Report on research security

The JASON Report on research security — formally Fundamental Research Security, document JSR-19-2I, prepared by the JASON advisory group under contract to MITRE and released in December 2019 — was commissioned by the National Science Foundation to assess the scale of risk that foreign government influence poses to US fundamental research and to recommend a policy response. Its central finding was that the openness of the US fundamental research enterprise is itself a strategic asset, and that policy should prioritise preserving that openness rather than closing it down.

Its core recommendations

• Expand the existing scope of research integrity to explicitly include full disclosure of a researcher’s outside commitments and actual or potential conflicts of interest.
• Treat a failure to disclose commitments or conflicts of interest as a presumptive violation of research integrity — to be investigated and adjudicated by funding agencies and universities with the same seriousness and consequences as other forms of research misconduct, rather than as a separate, lesser category of infraction.
• Have NSF and universities engage with intelligence and law-enforcement agencies so that academic leadership and faculty receive an evidence-based description of the actual scale and nature of the problem, rather than acting on rumour or unverified suspicion.
• Preserve a clear line between fundamental research, which should remain open, and research that is genuinely classified or contractually restricted, which is governed by separate controls entirely.

The report’s disclosure-first, integrity-violation framing is widely credited as the intellectual basis for the transparency-centred approach that NSPM-33, issued the following year, and its Common Disclosure Forms took, rather than a nationality-based restriction or blanket ban on international collaboration. Subsequent US policy — the CHIPS and Science Act‘s training and certification requirements among them — has generally followed this same structure: require disclosure, and treat concealment, not the underlying foreign relationship, as the violation. See Undue foreign influence for how this framing shaped the broader policy vocabulary that followed.