Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A PI discloses an honorary professorship at an overseas university involving an estimated two weeks per year of activity.
- Is an instance
A researcher's substantive joint appointment with a foreign laboratory is reviewed and a management plan is implemented.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
An invitation to deliver a one-off keynote lecture abroad is not a joint appointment.
- Not an instance
Co-authorship with an overseas colleague does not, by itself, constitute a joint appointment.
Editorial commentary
Foreign joint appointments range from honorary or visiting titles with negligible time commitments to substantive dual employment involving a separate laboratory, students, funding, and intellectual-property obligations at the foreign institution. The distinction matters because national research-security policy increasingly treats the two very differently: a nominal honorary title generally carries little compliance burden, while a substantive appointment — one involving real time, resources, or IP obligations abroad — raises genuine conflict-of-commitment and conflict-of-interest questions that require active institutional management.
Disclosure obligations
Disclosure of all joint or concurrent appointments, foreign and domestic, is required in current-and-pending-support statements, NIH’s Other Support format, and most national funder equivalents (UKRI, Tri-Agency, and others run comparable disclosure regimes). This is a personal disclosure obligation on the individual researcher, distinct from — but closely related to — the institution’s own foreign-influence and research-security review, and both typically feed into the same institutional conflict-of-interest management process once a substantive appointment is identified.
Institutional review and management
A substantive joint appointment commonly triggers institutional review covering time-commitment accounting (does the total committed effort across both institutions exceed 100 percent?), IP assignment (who owns inventions arising from work performed at the foreign institution?), and — where relevant — export-control screening if the foreign institution or country raises restricted-technology concerns (see export-controlled research and deemed export). Some funder policies go further, requiring the home institution to actively manage or, in defined circumstances, require termination of a foreign appointment found to conflict materially with grant obligations.
Relationship to visiting arrangements
A foreign joint appointment describes an outbound arrangement — a researcher at the home institution also holding a position abroad — and is the mirror image of a visiting scholar agreement, which governs an inbound foreign researcher’s time at the host institution. Both raise overlapping research-security and disclosure questions but from opposite directions, and both are commonly reviewed under the same institutional research-security policy framework, including screening informed by NSPM-33.
References
- NIH NOT-OD-21-073 (2021), Other Support disclosure requirements; NSPM-33 Implementation Guidance (2022).
Also known as
foreign joint appointment · dual affiliation
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Joint appointment (foreign)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/joint-appointment-foreign" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/joint-appointment-foreign",
"name": "Joint appointment (foreign)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/joint-appointment-foreign",
"description": "A formal appointment in which a researcher holds simultaneous positions at their primary institution and a foreign institution, each with defined roles, time commitments, and supervisory relationships.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-security#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/joint-appointment-foreign",
"sameAs": [
"foreign joint appointment",
"dual affiliation"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:22:53",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T15:37:10",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
