Education in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) will receive a long-overdue critique at a conference discussing the work of the US Office of Research Integrity on 3–5 April in Baltimore, Maryland.

The US National Institutes of Health has required recipients of training grants to receive RCR education since 1990, and it has been a prerequisite of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) since 2010 for all students and postdocs funded by its research grants.

In 2012, under contract from the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics at the University of Illinois, I reviewed the NSF policies of 27 major universities. I found that 26 depend solely (12) or largely (14) on online RCR training, with all but two using the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI; www.citiprogram.org).

Outsourcing ethics education in this way suggests that RCR education is developed and executed with an eye to expedience rather than excellence. It risks sending a message to young researchers that the university and its scientists do not place much emphasis on responsible conduct.

European universities, which do not yet have RCR mandates in place (see N. Axelsen and X. Bosch Nature 489, 208; 2012), should learn from the US experience and develop meaningful RCR programmes. These need to be taught by the people the students want to emulate — scientists.