TY - JOUR T1 - The absurdity of research registration for community-oriented knowledge coproduction JF - BMJ Global Health JO - BMJ Global Health DO - 10.1136/bmjgh-2021-007040 VL - 6 IS - 8 SP - e007040 AU - Kaaren Mathias AU - Shubha Nagesh AU - Sunitha Varghese AU - Imrana Qadeer AU - Anant Bhan Y1 - 2021/08/01 UR - http://gh.bmj.com/content/6/8/e007040.abstract N2 - Summary boxRequirement for a priori registration of research builds on the colonial roots of global health, excluding community-based researchers from global conversations.When communities and community-based organisations (CBOs) coproduce knowledge, it is more relevant, acceptable, appropriate, responsive and effective in generating change.Recognising the inherent value of studies which are small, specific, local, descriptive, observational or which focus on implementation reorders the current hierarchies of rigour and contributes to decolonising global health.Registration provides one pathway to public accountability, but perhaps a more rigorous pathway to accountability is long-term, engaged and documented relationships between researchers and communities.When necessary, global health research should allow for retrospective registration, with full fee waivers for researchers from CBOs and low-income and middle-income settings.We thank Eboreime and Abimbola for raising a crucial issue in their recent BMJ Global Health editorial,1 asking whether a priori registration of research is necessity or absurdity. The structural barriers, colonial roots and power imbalances within global health research are widely recognised.2–7 Requiring a priori registration of research (including trials) is a clear absurdity, adding yet another barrier to limit the participation of researchers and people in communities in low-income and middle-income (LMIC) settings. As practitioners and researchers based in or working with community-based organisations (CBOs), we outline below the challenges of a priori registration for CBOs and other groups with limited resources, and why requiring a priori registration has the potential to systematically exclude important perspectives and methodologies of communities. We then propose alternate ways that accountability can be achieved for research and interventional studies in global health and beyond.The largest determinants of health are political, socioeconomic and cultural.8 Health research must therefore work across disciplines, incorporating the social sciences and their research methodologies, and treat populations as active human participants and not mere objects … ER -