Department is Conservatives’ latest effort to square industrial strategy with free-market ideology, says Kieron Flanagan

One consequence of the creation of a standalone Department for Science, Innovation and Technology with its own cabinet minister has been a wave of historical comparisons from people like me. Initially, these tended to be with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills created by prime minister Gordon Brown in 2007. 

However, it’s starting to look as if a better reference point for DSIT might be John Major’s creation of the Office of Science and Technology (OST) in 1992. This was a mini-department within the Cabinet Office, headed by the chief scientific adviser and with a cabinet minister in the person of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. 

The OST reflected the Thatcherite aversion to active industrial policy, often disparaged as picking winners. At the same time, it established a UK Technology Foresight programme to set priorities for research spending, based in the idea that innovation involved pushing scientific discoveries through to the market.  

Technology Foresight failed to stick, but faith in the science-push model, aided by increasing efforts to ‘transfer’ knowledge to industry, remained dominant until the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, and in times of austerity, we’ve seen tentative movement back to investment in civil technological development, with the creation of Innovate UK and its network of Catapult centres. The new Advanced Research and Invention Agency is likely to sit in this space, albeit with better public relations. 

Alongside this came increased interest in industrial strategy. Science minister David Willetts championed Eight Great Technologies, while Theresa May and her business secretary Greg Clark spoke of grand challenges and modern industrial strategy. 

Such language, however, sits uncomfortably with Thatcher-inspired politicians. Boris Johnson’s government largely stopped talking about industrial strategy, and Rishi Sunak seems unlikely to revive it. Yet the government clearly still wants to set technological priorities. The new department launched with a glossy video in which secretary of state Michelle Donelan extols the chance to bring the “five technologies of the future” together in one portfolio. 

In 2021, concerns over reliance on imported high technology such as advanced semiconductors drove the Johnson administration to create the Office of Science and Technology Strategy (OSTS) in the Cabinet Office to set priorities in the context of international competition. 

There is, then, a tension between the desire to direct and the instinct towards laissez-faire innovation policy. OSTS was missing from the initial briefing on the new departmental arrangements, but Number 10 confirms that it will go into DSIT alongside the Government Office for Science. 

Shifting responsibility

At the time of writing, it is unclear whether responsibility for supporting the National Science and Technology Council, a cabinet committee chaired by the prime minister, will also shift to DSIT and Donelan.

OSTS’s priority-setting function was kept carefully separate from the quasi-independent advisory role of the Government Office for Science, even though GO-Science does a lot of the analytical work for OSTS. Moving the OSTS into the new department, alongside the implementation machinery of UK Research and Innovation, makes sense but it will surely make it impossible to keep the roles of OSTS and GO-Science distinct. 

Concern with national security and technological self-sufficiency were not major drivers of policy back in the early 1990s. But they have clearly influenced the creation of the OSTS and, presumably, the choice to locate it in the Cabinet Office, close to the national security machinery. The move to DSIT could make it harder to coordinate science and technology policy with strategic concerns, but it could also free priority-setting from being overly driven by perceived—and inevitably politicised—threats to sovereignty and security.

It’s possible the UK is moving full circle, from tentative efforts to rebuild an activist technology and industrial policy back to a naive science-push belief that technological priorities can be realised merely by guiding UKRI-funded basic research, leaving development and application to take care of themselves. 

This does not mean there will be no picking winners—no government has any choice but to make technological bets. But it could mean that systematic, transparent and accountable discussions about priorities happen largely at the research stage, while technological winners depend on the whims of ministers, advisers and lobbyists. The problems with the OneWeb satellite system and Britishvolt battery factory show the dangers of such an approach. 

Kieron Flanagan is professor of science and technology policy at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, University of Manchester

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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Estimate that spending target has been hit will shake up innovation policy, says Kieron Flanagan

On 29 September, the Office for National Statistics delivered the biggest surprise to hit UK research and innovation policy in years. Announcing a change to how it estimates business expenditure on R&D, the ONS revised its measure sharply upward—by about £16 billion a year.

On Twitter, the economist Josh Martin posted a quick estimate of what this means for the ratio of R&D to GDP, the widely used indicator of national research intensity (we don’t yet know the full effect because the extra R&D spending will itself have a small impact on the GDP estimation). It had seemed the UK was stuck on 1.6-1.7 per cent, but Martin estimated that the country had in fact hit the government’s goal of reaching 2.4 per cent by 2027 way back in 2018.

Scholars and analysts like me have long argued that the quantity of R&D—which is just an input to innovation processes—is not the whole story, and that we ought also to think about the quality and composition of spending. We have also fretted that the OECD definition underpinning national statistics excludes a lot of activity analogous to R&D in services and the creative industries. 

But while we may have been lukewarm or critical about targeting R&D intensity as a policy, we’ve not really questioned the data. The ONS’s move is a salutary reminder not to rely on any one indicator, even for innovation inputs.

Unhelpful success?

On the political front, former science minister George Freeman has warned that Liz Truss’s administration might claim job done on the 2.4 per cent target and abandon or reassign the funding promised in the 2021 spending review, along with the broader commitment to a modest regional rebalancing of R&D spending.

Perhaps focusing on unfavourable international comparisons of R&D intensity wasn’t such a great lobbying tactic after all. That said, 2.4 per cent is just the OECD average: many nations the UK sees as its peers and competitors spend more like 3 per cent.
 
The revision also has implications for long-standing questions about the UK’s performance in research and innovation.

Since the late 1980s, for example, government investment has looked quite different to that seen in most R&D-intensive nations. Under Margaret Thatcher, the country essentially abandoned large-scale investment in civil technology programmes in areas like computing to concentrate on basic and ‘strategic’ (near-basic) science.

The assumption then and since was that ‘technology transfer’ would magically turn all this science into things that industry could take up and commercialise through further R&D. So why haven’t the enormous efforts at technology transfer and commercialisation since then produced enormous economic and social benefits? A better view of business R&D might provide some clues.

Hidden figures

We also know we need a better handle on other kinds of innovation inputs. These include investment in ‘intangibles’ such as brands or designs, and R&D-like activities in the creative sector and knowledge-intensive services. This could help inform policies to support innovation in these sectors, which account for most of the UK’s jobs and GDP, and include some huge exporters. 
 
The revisions also pose new questions. First, if, as the revision suggests, ONS statistics have significantly underestimated R&D spending in small firms, what does the profile of activity in different-sized companies now look like, and how does that compare with other countries?

On the one hand, R&D in small firms might be more ambitious and radical compared with that in a large incumbent. On the other, it might be more speculative and less well managed. Larger firms may also be better at capturing the learning spillovers from R&D that seem to be so important.

Second, if recent decades have seen small firms do a larger proportion of private R&D, does this reflect a kind of outsourcing? Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, may rely on biotech startups to make risky early investments in new technologies, only to buy them up if the bet pays off. And firms that sell R&D services to other companies also seem to be very significant in the UK.

While we’d expect to see this in other countries like the US, it might be that this kind of outsourcing is more common in the UK, or that the way we do it here delivers fewer social and economic benefits—perhaps because the average UK startup is lower quality or less well-managed, or less able to capture the spillovers from R&D.

The new picture of the UK’s private R&D spending raises many questions. Now it’s time to start looking for answers.

Kieron Flanagan is professor of science and technology policy at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, University of Manchester

This article originally stated that Josh Martin worked at the Office for National Statistics. This is no longer the case and the affiliation has been removed

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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National evaluation was invented to concentrate funding. Will that change this time, asks Kieron Flanagan?

The 1980s and its issues feel a long way away, even if a 1970s-style combination of inflation and stagnant growth looks to be making a comeback. No wonder, then, that for many observers, fans and critics alike, the reasons why the UK has a Research Excellence Framework are lost in the mists of time.

But those reasons are still relevant, and the aftermath of the REF 2021 results is an ideal moment to remember how and why selectivity in research funding—and its corollary, concentration—became the overriding priority in UK science policy. 

Research evaluation was, more or less, invented to be a pump that sustained research funding levels in elite universities, which happened to be in London, the south-east and east of England. It has done that job for decades. 

February’s Levelling Up white paper, however, committed to at least arrest the increasing concentration of public R&D funding in these regions. The REF results can allow policymakers to begin that process, perhaps even sending the pump into reverse—if they choose. 

Flash back to 1986, the year the Save British Science campaign was launched. The Lords Science and Technology Committee was voicing grave concern about the state of UK science in the face of university funding cuts and pressures on research spending by other government departments created by broader public spending cuts. 

There was talk of the need to enshrine a formal division between research and teaching universities, as a way to protect the leading edge of the research base. In this context of managed decline, the old opaque system for dishing out core research funding was no longer tenable.

A rational basis for selectively allocating the scarce block grant was called for. Thus, also in 1986, the University Grants Committee conducted its first Research Selectivity Exercise. 

Since that first exercise, the funding formula tied to national research evaluations has allowed government to progressively concentrate its block grant into a few places, in order to maintain their globally competitive position. As a result, institutions in the golden triangle of Cambridge, London and Oxford have been magnets for the best and brightest from across the world, to the obvious benefit of their host cities.

Research spending is not a magic wand for levelling up. Even so, it seems clear that other places could benefit from strengthening the positive feedback loops between funding, reputation and talent, as Oxford, Cambridge and London have done. 

Block funding underpins universities’ ability to sustain a critical mass in research. This attracts and produces people and firms. Alongside investment in hard infrastructure, better education and skills, and efforts to stimulate greater demand for innovation among firms, this could indeed drive levelling up.

Seams of excellence

Returning to 2022, the REF results show that quality has increased across the board. Presumably the census-like nature of the exercise, which sought this time to include all research-active university staff, has revealed seams of excellence in the gritty lands beyond the golden triangle. Indeed, Research England boss and REF proprietor-in-chief David Sweeney noted that “the other regions are a bit better than we thought they were”. 

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has yet to reveal how the funding formula will translate the REF results into approximately £2 billion of funding each year. But on 30 May, BEIS and UK Research and Innovation published the detail of allocations over the current spending review period to 2024-25. 

UKRI’s release says that the balance between the English block research grant and research council grant funding is broadly to be maintained, in the context of a general uplift in spending over the next few years. The Beis announcement stresses the importance of using R&D funding to support levelling up. 

REF 2014 also uncovered islands of excellence across the country. But, against a backdrop of austerity, the English formula for dividing the block grant was tweaked—by, for example, changing the funding ratio for 4* and 3* results from a 3:1 ratio to 4:1—so that the increasing concentration of resources in the golden triangle wasn’t disrupted. 

Politicians are understandably drawn to one-off research investments for the cost-effective photo-opportunities they offer and the impression they give of a journey to a generic high- tech future. But such projects require no broader change in strategy, and little political courage. It’s time for ministers to decide whether UK research is still in the  business of managing decline. 

Kieron Flanagan is Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, University of Manchester

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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The REF is ripe for radical change, say Stephen Curry, Elizabeth Gadd and James Wilsdon

As we continue to digest last week’s headlines from the Research Excellence Framework (REF)—and with more to come as detailed panel reports and impact case studies emerge over the next few weeks—attention is already turning to the scope and design of the next assessment cycle.

As in 2008 and 2014, the possibility of a simpler, cheaper process that draws on readily available metrics is being floated as an alternative to a process that is widely agreed to have become overly cumbersome.

It is worth remembering that anyone under 60 who works in UK universities is part of a system shaped by successive waves of national research assessment, dating back to the first research selectivity exercise in 1986. Over eight cycles, this has become a highly complex evaluation machine, to use a term coined by the political scientist Peter Dahler-Larsen.

This machinery is simultaneously admired—and seen by some as something to emulate—as a fair and accountable basis on which to determine the annual allocation of around £2 billion of quality-related (QR) funding, and contested as a source of bureaucracy, competition and conformity.

So it is right that the REF’s designers and users remain alert to the potential of new technologies and other innovations to enhance, reboot or streamline its operations. When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, the UK was already completing its second assessment cycle. Since then, advances in ICT, data science, scientometrics and related fields have transformed the possibilities and practices of measurement and management, and research assessment has advanced alongside.

Many see machine learning and artificial intelligence as the latest general-purpose technologies, with the capacity to boost productivity and transform working practices across many sectors, including research. There have been calls to build these technologies into the REF.

Catch the wave

Over the decades, the culture and management of UK university research has become so deeply fused with the machinery of assessment that it makes reform difficult. When viewed from afar, unpicking the whole thing can seem straightforward; up close, all you see is a spaghetti of interdependencies and connections.

That said, various factors are now aligning to support a more radical overhaul of the exercise than at any point in recent years.

Public R&D spending is set to grow through to 2025. There is the potential for more strategic integration between QR and other funding streams through the structures of UK Research and Innovation, combined with heightened urgency around research culture, impact, diversity and inclusion. And there is already a strong drive to reduce bureaucracy, through Adam Tickell’s ongoing review and UKRI’s initiative for ‘Simpler and Better’ funding.

So the time is right to look in an open and creative way at how we could simplify and improve the REF. The Future Research Assessment Programme, which the research funding bodies initiated in 2020, is admirable in its scope and intent to do that. Multiple strands of evaluation and analysis are now underway.

As the latest addition to this mix, Research England is announcing today that it has asked the three of us to lead an updated review of the potential role of metrics in the UK research assessment system.

Short and sharp

The Metric Tide Revisited will take a short, sharp, evidence-informed look at current and potential uses of metrics, with four tightly defined objectives:

• To revisit the conclusions and recommendations of the last review of these questions—The Metric Tide, which two of us co-authored in 2015—and assess progress against these;
• To consider whether recent developments in the infrastructures, methodologies and uses of research metrics negate or change any of those 2015 conclusions, or suggest additional priorities;
• To look afresh at the role of metrics in any future REF, and consider whether design changes being considered by the FRAP suggest similar or different conclusions to those reached in 2015;
• To offer updated advice to UKRI and the higher education funding bodies on the most effective ways of supporting and incentivising responsible research assessment and uses of metrics.

This will be a rapid review, completing in September 2022. The original Metric Tide was underpinned by extensive evidence gathering and consultation, and there’s no need to repeat all this from scratch.

We’ve also seen welcome progress on these agendas since 2015, under the umbrella of the Declaration on Research Assessment; through institutions adopting their own policies for responsible metrics and assessment; and with additional guidance at an international level from bodies such as the International Network of Research Management Societies, Science Europe, Unesco and the Global Research Council.

We will hold roundtables in June and July to invite formal inputs from experts and stakeholder groups. These will include researchers across disciplines and career stages; scientometricians; metrics providers; university leaders and research managers; publishers; librarians; learned societies; research funders; and infrastructure providers. We will also work with the Forum for Responsible Research Metrics—itself created as a recommendation of The Metric Tide—as a source of informal oversight.

More than anything, we as a team care passionately about improving research cultures and delivering the evidence and answers that the FRAP, and the wider community, need. We know how vital it is to get assessment systems right; how the purposes and priorities of the REF need to be weighed alongside technologies, methods and applications; and how any proposed reforms to the REF must engage with the users’ experiences and insights and the expectation of stakeholders.

The different strands of FRAP, including ours, will be drawn together in the autumn. It will then be up to ministers to decide how radical they want to be. We are quietly optimistic about the prospects for positive change.

Stephen Curry is professor of structural biology and assistant provost for equality, diversity and inclusion at Imperial College London, and chair of the Declaration on Research Assessment steering committee. He was a co-author of The Metric Tide

Elizabeth Gadd is research policy manager at Loughborough University and chair of the International Network of Research Management Societies Research Evaluation Group

James Wilsdon is digital science professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield, and director of the Research on Research Institute. He was chair of The Metric Tide review and is a founding member of the Forum for Responsible Research Metrics

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight and Research Europe

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Constructive advice on failed proposals is hugely valuable to early-career researchers, says Gemma Derrick

Discontent with how UK academia is governed is most obvious at the macro level. The past month has seen strikes over issues of overwork, pay, inequalities in research culture, and the future of academia. There has been increased social media chatter around decisions to leave academia, prompted by unworkable conditions, increased stress and strain on mental health.  

But academics’ most frequent and significant interaction with the research system and its inequalities comes at an individual level, through peer review of draft publications and grant proposals. Repeated experience of applying for funding and failing, as most researchers do, contributes to the growing sense of malaise.

This is especially true for early career researchers seeking a place in a system where the number of PhD holders far outweighs the number of available jobs in research. Pursuing a future in academia means reaching milestones that show research independence. Here, the ability to navigate peer review is vital.

Is peer review obsolete?

Evidence of inefficiency, bias and arbitrariness in peer review has led some critics to question its role in a modern, transparent and accountable research system. There is an increasing interest in alternatives such as predictive indicators for success and lotteries. 

But these methods bring biases and inefficiencies of their own. Better than rushing to replace peer review would be to understand how it can be made to work better.

Over the past two years, my colleagues and I have been working with the Wellcome Trust to study its grant decision-making processes for early career researchers. Using a combination of performance analysis, interviews and linguistic coding of reviewer reports, we have found the type of peer review that best supports a future career in research.

Unlike most previous studies, we focused on applicants who miss out. This reveals more about what works and what doesn’t in peer review than focusing on success stories. As we see it, reviewers have two jobs: to assist decision-making and provide feedback to applicants. Review should be about participation and development, not just assessment—both evaluating proposals and keeping applicants’ future in mind.

Currently, too many reviewers focus on the first function and overlook the second. One in our study branded an applicant who had authored two Nature papers within four years of completing their PhD as “insufficient”. Another suggested an applicant should only be considered if they moved to another country over 3,000 kilometres away.

Such unfair comments show an emphasis on separating success from failure, and on making judgments based on assumptions rather than offering advice based on the contents of the proposal. Forgetting that there are individuals, and sometimes vulnerable individuals, behind every application can lead to reviewing that is inappropriate and potentially harmful to young researchers.

Enhancing lives

Instead, reviewer feedback should aim to be actionable, targeted and fair. Peer review can and should be less about dividing winners from losers and more about giving the feedback and inspiration that academics need to make further applications and build their careers.

Good feedback sends applicants a positive signal, regardless of the funding outcome. It helps improve future applications towards future success. 

In our study, most unsuccessful applicants went on to seek funding elsewhere. But those who received actionable and fair feedback were more than twice as likely to reapply than those who did not. Their training, effort and talent are less likely to leave academia.

Peer review that balances its two functions, seeking to help applicants and improve proposals, as well as providing a decision, is particularly important for early career researchers. They are less likely to have access to the resources and expertise needed to improve their application, and have less experience of previous funding applications.

To better serve applicants and the system as a whole, peer review should be less focused on decision-making and recognise its role in the development of researchers. This reimagining requires reviewers to realise that they are also mentors and provide feedback that helps the applicant as well as helping the decision-making process. It also means focusing less on replacing peer review with some alternative, and more on recognising and realising the potential of the existing process.

Implementing these changes is not about creating more work for already overstretched reviewers. It is more about changing perceptions of, and approaches to, peer review, to ensure the feedback it provides adds as much value as possible to the development of the next generation of researchers.  

Gemma Derrick is an associate professor in the School of Education, University of Bristol

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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The British approach to assessment is colonising the world—with mixed results, says Marta Wróblewska

The impact agenda introduced in the UK with the 2014 Research Excellence Framework did much more than revolutionise domestic research evaluation. Like many developments in British academia, it was keenly followed, and often emulated, by policymakers in countries around the world. Among these are Norway and Poland. 

Between 2015 and 2018, Norway experimented with impact case studies modelled on the REF. It took a light-touch approach, not tying the exercise to funding as the UK did. Poland, in contrast, has gone all-in, linking impact to funding. Review panels are currently working on the country’s national research evaluation, following the 15 January deadline for submissions. Among many new and revamped elements are an impact assessment closely modelled on the REF. 

Similarities with the British model include the use of case studies, the template for recording them, and even the language, as impact case studies have to be written in both Polish and English. But there are also important differences, some of which may undermine the usefulness of the exercise.

The first mention of impact in Poland appeared in a 2016 white paper on innovation published by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. This made explicit reference to “following the example of Great Britain” on using evaluation to identify impact. This became fact in the 2018 Law on Higher Education. 

Academic evaluation

Poland has a long tradition of research evaluation, with national assessments roughly every four years since 1991, and a century-long tradition of systematic reflection on the nature of scientific work. Academic evaluation is a strong research field, and always a hot topic among academics. But perhaps because the new law covered several important areas—from doctoral education, to career progression, to evaluation—the impact element received little attention. 

Ministry staff later expressed surprise that academics did not pick up on impact at all in consultations. As a result impact evaluation was introduced without a proper debate, almost by stealth. 

The ministry commissioned a pilot evaluation but the results were ambiguous and the final evaluations of the case studies were never made public. So while UK institutions were able to prepare for impact’s inclusion in REF 2014 through many rounds of consultations, and in Norway the exercise itself was run as a trial, in Poland impact evaluation came abruptly. 

Even towards the evaluation deadline, it seemed like many faculty committees and deans were busy preparing for the traditional outputs component, only realising at the last moment that an impact case study would have a bigger effect on a unit’s score than any individual publication. This is partly because the ministry’s confusing decisions about assessment of journal publications kept scholars focused on—and angry about—something else. 

Impact accounts for 20 per cent of each unit’s final score. In SSH ‘quality of research’ (outputs) accounts for 70 per cent, and the amount of funding brought in through research grants or commercial services accounts for the remaining 10 per cent. 

While official documentation does not define impact clearly, various fragments point to a broad interpretation close to the British one. The Polish evaluation model, however, is very literal. 

Impact consists of reach and significance, like in the UK, but both have been clearly defined, with the documentation setting out the criteria for assigning a score, and given precise weightings, with each accounting for half of the final score. Also, reach is defined geographically—only international reach can receive maximum points.

Finally, some differences between Poland and the UK are simply odd. For instance, Poland has a separate route to submit additional case studies based on ‘excellent monographs’ or ‘biographical dictionaries’, and a case study’s score can be boosted by 20 per cent for interdisciplinary work. At the last minute, the word count in case studies for underpinning research was increased, suggesting an unexpected focus on research quality. 

From an almost verbatim copy of the British version, the Polish concept of research impact has morphed into a whole other beast. The impact case studies have already been made available through a searchable database; along with a points score, evaluators will return descriptive feedback. But because of the sudden way in which impact evaluation has been introduced in Poland—without debate or adequate support—impact remains poorly understood. This is reflected in the uneven quality of case studies: having read a few dozen, I don’t envy the evaluators. 

Marta Natalia Wróblewska is in the Institute of Humanities at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw

This article is the first in the Political Science ‘New Voices’ series, aiming to showcase early career researchers and present a broader variety of views and perspectives on research culture.

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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City-centre developments need social missions from the start, say Alina Kadyrova and colleagues

In recent years, innovation districts have emerged in cities including Melbourne to Medellín as urban alternatives to out-of-town science parks. These branded urban areas aim to bring together business, research, educational, cultural and community spaces, with the aim of achieving synergies that drive innovation and creativity.

Many UK cities and towns are promoting innovation districts, quarters, corridors or hubs. The UK’s Connected Places Catapult identifies more than 100 ‘innovation places’ of different sizes and themes across the country.

The risk, though, is that innovation districts become high-tech enclaves that offer little benefit to most citizens and perhaps even worsen existing inequalities. A collaboration between researchers at the universities of Manchester and Melbourne is looking at how innovation districts might be made more inclusive and sustainable—a question made more pressing by the social and economic effects of the Covid pandemic.

The results will feed into planning for a new innovation district, ID Manchester, developed on the site of an existing university campus by the University of Manchester, in partnership with property developer Bruntwood SciTech. It forms part of the city centre’s Oxford Road Corridor, a partnership between city leaders, universities, hospitals, cultural institutions, a real estate developer and an existing science park, and which currently hosts about 8,800 businesses and 79,000 employees.

Last December, we brought together scholars and practitioners in a virtual workshop to discuss how innovation districts can be sustainable and inclusive.

Benefits and boundaries

Many innovation districts are established as private-public partnerships, noted Arnault Morisson, an economic geographer at the University of Bern. Developers are obliged to return a profit from their often major investments. This raises the question of who will ensure that the development generates benefits beyond its boundaries.

Alex Gardiner, a director at economic development consultancy Metro Dynamics, stressed that innovation districts should define their social mission early on in their design. This should include clarity around participants, funding, wages, goals, accountability, governance and wider benefits. In contrast, she said, many districts only report their economic indicators, such as the number of startups or patents granted.

Richard Jones, vice-president for regional innovation and civic engagement at the University of Manchester, added that trust among stakeholders is crucial to the success of such a development—everyone has to buy into the proposed model and its aims.

Claire Eagle, from the Connected Places Catapult, emphasised the importance of physical and social infrastructure to place-making for innovation and creativity. Morisson noted that Barcelona’s local government required the city’s innovation district to dedicate 30 per cent of its area to public housing, parks and community spaces.

Claire added that, while there are diverse approaches to building innovation districts, good governance invariably depends on collaboration, representation and diversity. Effective leadership implies responsiveness to challenges and experimentation. These are especially important, both in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and in an evolving policy context such as the UK’s Levelling Up agenda.

Talent magnets

Lou Cordwell, chair of the Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), emphasised that inclusivity and sustainability are crucial to both the economic and social success of innovation districts. In ID Manchester, there’s a commitment for its emerging innovation district to address societal missions as well as sustainability. ID Manchester will make a £28 million investment in public spaces, working with local people to co-design community spaces. It will also comply with Greater Manchester’s environmental plan and net-zero initiatives.

Firms want infrastructures that help them fulfil national and international sustainability targets. And footloose talent is increasingly drawn to places offering inclusivity, sustainability and social responsibility. ID Manchester is developing a manifesto to set out its mission and anticipated economic and social contribution, said John Holden, associate vice-president for special projects at the University of Manchester.

Despite the many examples of innovation districts around the world, it’s still not easy to find evidence of developments that have generated broader public benefits. Projects are often constrained by multiple commitments to development shareholders and policymakers.

Innovation districts depend on creating connections, but it’s all too easy to focus on a narrow set of actors and links. Building and sustaining broader links, so that varied organisations and diverse communities—including public and third-sector organisations as well as companies—can co-exist and work towards social and economic impacts is more challenging. It requires a firm social commitment from the outset, a commitment to good governance, and a recognition that an innovation district is embedded in a wider urban and city-regional geography.

It’s crucial to keep asking the key question: innovation for whom?

Alina Kadyrova, Kieron Flanagan, Philip Shapira and Elvira Uyarra all work at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, University of Manchester.

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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From technopopulism, to Hawking, to words to live by, James Wilsdon picks his favourite titles

Back in the spring, as we blurred out of lockdown, my seven-year-old announced over breakfast one morning that he had a project. Before we knew it, our baggy, blended family—with branches in Sheffield, Cumbria and Melbourne—had been dragooned into Ned’s Reading Contest, complete with a league table, complex points system and a weekly video update from the boy himself.

There were rules. Lots of rules. “No newspapers!” barked the Simon Cowell of home reading, as his grandpa, hope in his eyes, lifted a well-thumbed copy of the Melbourne Age up to the screen.

“And no boring work books.” This last edict aimed at me, as I gently enquired about the eligibility of a book I was half-reading for a project. “They must have chapters. And a story.”

Well into my 30s, I devoured novels, plays and poems. These days—whether down to work stress, too much top-notch TV, the distractions of social media, or pandemic-induced ennui—I find the opposite. I need to be relaxed before I can open myself up to the joys and sorrows of a novel.

So I gulp down fiction when I’m on holiday, and otherwise stick to boring work books. With holidays not really a priority or possibility for many of us this year, that meant I found myself in the relegation zone of Ned’s Reading Challenge.

I have, though, continued to read—and scribble in, agree with vehemently and, occasionally, rail against—work books. So, even if the seven-year-olds among us may take some persuading, let me highlight five non-fiction books that I’ve particularly enjoyed in 2021.

Them, us and you

I first heard Christopher Bickerton discussing his and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti’s book Technopopulism: The new logic of democratic politics on David Runciman and Helen Thompson’s superb podcast Talking Politics. The book describes brilliantly how a succession of recent political movements have blended technocracy and populism in unexpected ways: from Blair’s New Labour and Macron’s En Marche, to Italy’s Five Star Movement and Dominic Cummings and his band of Brexiteers.

With the dance between technocracy, democracy, experts and publics such a prominent strand of the Covid-19 story, I’ve found myself returning to Bickerton and Accetti to make sense of certain debates. As one example—not in the book—should we see the new Advanced Research and Invention Agency as an attempt to give the UK a technopopulist research funder?

I’ve known and admired Anil Seth for many years; we were colleagues at the University of Sussex. So I was eager to read Being You: A new science of consciousness when it came out in the summer.

I expected it to be good, but I was blown away: it’s exhilarating, informed, passionate and provocative in equal measure—as much a groundbreaking work of philosophy as of science. It’s a book that lingers with you, while at the same time forcing you to rethink exactly who and what “you” are.

Warts and all

I met Stephen Hawking a few times in my years working at the Royal Society. I particularly recall the unveiling of his portrait by Tai-Shan Schierenberg in 2009. Martin Rees, who was Royal Society president at the time, knew Hawking well from their decades at Cambridge University and would occasionally raise a private (or even public) eyebrow at one of his colleague’s publicity-seeking statements.

It always felt hard to get the measure of Hawking: as scientist, celebrity, survivor and symbol he evaded normal criteria. So I devoured Charles Seife’s Hawking Hawking as the key, or at least a key, to a longstanding riddle.

It doesn’t disappoint: Seife strips away everything we feel we sort of know from films, books and media coverage, to deliver a brilliant, no-holds-barred biography, which somehow both diminishes Hawking and renders him more impressive, despite his many flaws.

How Social Science Got Better: Overcoming bias with more evidence, diversity, and self-reflection
by the US political scientist Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, is an upbeat yet deeply researched tour d’horizon. Had it been around when I was leading the UK’s Campaign for Social Science, I would have quoted it all the time.

As it is, the British Academy and Academy of Social Sciences should be thrusting a copy upon any MP, adviser or treasury official amenable to evidence-informed persuasion of the value of these disciplines. As a part-time meta-scientist, I also appreciated Grossmann’s nuanced discussion of how the social sciences inform and relate to higher-profile efforts in the natural sciences to reform the research enterprise.

How to be

My fifth choice isn’t a science or research book—although it draws creatively from psychology, management and other fields. I seldom read self-help books, but Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time and how to use it is in a class of its own.

For the past year, I’ve kept an extract from Burkeman’s final Guardian column in a small blue frame above my desk. Each of his “secrets to a fairly fulfilled life” holds a profound truth, but one particularly resonates: “There will always be too much to do—and this realisation is liberating….The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.”

If you’ve ever chased me for a deadline, you’ll know I take this as a mantra to live by. And now there’s a whole book of similarly wise and sane advice on how to survive our brief time on this earth.

Looking ahead to 2022, I’m excited to read The Quantified Scholar by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra; there’s already a generous taster available on his website. Now at the University of California San Diego, Pardo-Guerra was prompted to start this book by experiencing the unique joys of the Research Excellence Framework while working at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

For anyone into the politics of measurement, management and madness in contemporary higher education, it promises to be a must-read. It should hit the shops just in time for the REF results in May.

Finally, I intend to tackle Bruno Latour’s After Lockdown: A metamorphosis soon. On my first attempt, its Kafka-inspired meditation on “becoming a termite” was a bit much. With Omicron in the air and case numbers rising, now doesn’t feel like the right time either. Maybe—hopefully—one for the spring?

James Wilsdon is digital science professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield and director of the Research on Research Institute. He tweets (when he should be reading novels) @jameswilsdon

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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Researchers may want emergency measures to continue, but public trust has eroded, says Cian O’Donovan

British Summer Time was an emergency measure, brought in during the First World War to maximise daylight hours for agriculture workers. A century later, we’re still changing our clocks twice yearly.

Measures brought in during crises, in other words, have a way of becoming permanent, and of being applied in situations beyond those used to justify them. As the crisis stage of Covid-19 ends in the UK, a review of the temporary pandemic measures is now in order.

On research data, one key policy tool has been control of patient information (COPI) notices. It is usually illegal to share patients’ identifiable information without their consent for purposes beyond their individual care. COPI notices can not only make this legal, but require GPs or other NHS stakeholders to do so. Issued by the health secretary, these allow the processing of usually confidential information, such as GP health records, for specified purposes.

One COPI notice, for instance, requires GPs to supply UK Biobank—a huge biomedical database that integrates the genomic and health records of a cohort of 500,000 consented patients—with their data about its cohort. This can then be released to researchers working to understand the virus and its impact on individuals and populations.

Other COPI notices have gone to NHS Digital, NHS England, GPs and local authorities, allowing them to process a wide range of confidential information without seeking patient permission, in the name of tackling Covid.

COPI notices are a means of prioritising one set of ethical values over another. During the pandemic, research practices that placed a premium on patient privacy have been traded for fast-flowing data.

These notices need to be renewed every six months; unless NHS Digital requests another extension, the current batch will expire in March 2022. At some point, the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) will have to decide which measures to keep, what to adapt, and what to decommission.

The game to muster influence is already afoot. Experts in data science and artificial intelligence, convened by the Turing Institute, have noted that “consideration might be given to how the best aspects of COPI might be retained, whilst ensuring that the permissiveness does not undermine individual rights and protections”. The notice granted to mandate UK Biobank is itself a sign that large research projects can shape data regulation.

There are important points on all sides. Researchers using the data are reluctant to give up their productivity gains. Privacy and open-science advocates want to shine a light on the infrastructure for public health data.

Perhaps the clearest argument is this: there is still lots of science to do. The data, disease specialisms and disciplines needed to understand long Covid, for example, remain uncertain. Keeping the data flowing will probably help.

Reluctance to let go

Data infrastructures and data governance arrangements at the start of the pandemic were not as good as they should have been, according to the Coronavirus: Lessons Learned to Date report, published by two parliamentary committees in October. Some researchers are likely to see COPI notices as a means of doing things that they should already have been able to do. They will be reluctant to let them go.

This stance, though, risks overlooking the dramatic shift in public attitudes around how data are collected and used. Moves to use emergency measures to drive post-pandemic data strategies must contend with increasing strains on citizens’ confidence in public data.

This was evident in the summer, as the health department and NHS Digital were caught on the hop during the long-planned rollout of the General Practice Data for Planning and Research programme. In June alone, more than 1.2 million people opted out of sharing their GP data. They were unwilling to grant GPDPR a social licence to operate, despite data-protection laws and assurances from NHS Digital.

The controversy shows that the debate around data and trust has changed. This is no surprise. Parliamentary committees have challenged the public value of the huge spend on NHS Test and Trace, and campaigners against NHS privatisation have objected to the decision to pay the US tech company Palantir £23 million to run the Covid-19 Data Store. If data controllers are struggling to gain trust, it is because goodwill has been squandered during the pandemic.

Policymakers must recognise these changes in the social context in which data are collected and used. We don’t know what the public thinks of COPI notices because they haven’t been asked. Neither do we know much about their long-term impact on research, although work by the PHG Foundation is due on this soon.

At bottom, researchers’ desire to get their hands on patient data may be in tension with their need to get patients to trust the system enough to share their data. Patients are reassured that their data will only be shared anonymously, but each COPI notice is an instance where that has not been the case. So who can blame patients for withdrawing consent to share data, full-stop?

Meaningful involvement

NHS Digital cannot afford another GPDPR-style controversy. Recent research by the UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator shows that, when asked, people said they want trust in institutions to be improved and they want meaningful involvement in pandemic policymaking. Without this, further build-outs from emergency data measures risk perpetuating a cycle of distrust that might take years to remedy. This point was emphasised by the National Data Guardian, Nicola Byrne, who recently warned that emergency powers brought in to allow the sharing of data to help tackle the spread of Covid-19 could not run on indefinitely.

Policy for public data needs to address the following. First, data institutions must show they can be trusted and make a better case for public benefit. For instance, any process to make COPI notices permanent should be accompanied by public dialogue and open debate. The DHSC, NHS Digital and the UK genomics community must make the case stating how public data benefits us all.

Second, data projects must work out how to address individual and collective concerns together. Debates should not be reduced to individual privacy versus population health.

It looks likely that COPI notices will be renewed again in March 2022, but possibly with the proviso that this is the last time. That gives data controllers and users just under a year to build trust by making a better case for why we all should buy into these benefits. That is less time than it might seem.

Cian O’Donovan is a researcher at the UK Ethics Accelerator, working from the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London 

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The chancellor’s largesse won’t relieve all the pressures on UK research policy, says James Wilsdon

Reflecting last week on the UK’s Net Zero Strategy, Rebecca Willis, professor in energy and climate governance at Lancaster University, described the “two-cheers problem” (that is, not three cheers) in environment policy.

This arises when ministers, civil servants and advisers feel that they have strained to deliver the best result that is politically possible, only to receive a tepid welcome from the green lobby that has been loudly pushing them hardest for change.

As chancellor Rishi Sunak presented his first spending review last week, the science lobby had its own two-cheers moment.

The uplift in R&D spending to £20 billion a year by 2025 falls short of the £22bn repeatedly pledged by the government. It makes reaching the medium-term goal of investing 2.4 per cent of GDP in R&D by 2027 harder. And it comes when the OECD average for R&D investment—on which the goal was based—has already risen to 2.5 per cent, with an impressive roll-call of countries exceeding this.

The £22bn target has been moved to 2027, but given the need to first navigate another general election, spending review, and perhaps chancellor, it’s effectively been kicked into the long grass. For now, £20bn it is.

This outcome is only disappointing, however, when compared with the high bar of expectation set by the government itself—particularly prime minister Boris Johnson, with his talk of the UK as a science superpower and predilection for white-coated, test-tube cosplay.

On any other measure, it’s a fantastic result. Set against flat or anaemic growth in R&D investment since 2010, and with intense post-pandemic pressure on all areas of public spending, securing a 25 per cent uplift in real terms over three years is a huge vote of confidence in the contribution that R&D can make to the government’s economic and social agenda.

Jitters and shrouds

It is also better than a jittery research community had feared. The weeks leading up to the review saw a barrage of letters and statements from the Russell Group, national academies, Wellcome Trust, Campaign for Science and Engineering and others, warning ministers in ever starker terms of the dangers of retrenchment.

This aggravates the two-cheers problem. Having spent the summer shroud-waving, it can be hard to recalibrate in response to what is, on conventional benchmarks, extremely positive news. CaSE, for example, gave the chancellor a grudging three stars (on average) out of five.

Others were more enthusiastic, but the overall tenor of responses from research leaders was one of measured support. No one has given Sunak or science minister George Freeman a bouquet on behalf of the research community, in the way that William Cullerne Bown, founder of Research Professional News, did to then science minister David Willetts following the 2010 spending review.

Three cheers

I won’t be calling Interflora. But I am inclined to give HM Treasury the full three cheers. A couple of weeks ago, I summarised the possible outcomes of the spending review as ‘three Fs’: a fudge (more uncertainty); a fiddle (clever tricks with the public accounts); or a falling short against government targets.

We’ve ended up with the last of these, but not by much. As spending reviews go, this is about as good as it gets. Budgets will rise by £1.1bn next year, followed by a whopping £3.3bn in 2023-24, and the R&D system has received long-awaited clarity over the scale and speed of public investment.

Helpfully, the spending review also simplifies the R&D budget controlled by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) into three parts. The first is core research, which covers quality-related funding, responsive-mode grants under UK Research and Innovation and the national academies. These receive modest but real year-on-year increases, shoring up the central pillars of university research on which so much else depends.

The second is Innovate UK, which receives a larger uplift to £1.1bn by 2025, as part of a suite of measures designed to boost business R&D investment.

Other positives include a near-doubling of research budgets for government departments beyond BEIS, some of which will go towards R&D in support of net zero; a relaxation of the rules for R&D tax credits, to make data science eligible; extra measures to attract talented researchers to the UK; and the unexpected restoration of the R&D elements of overseas aid, as the target to contribute 0.7 per cent of GDP kicks back in. This points towards a second coming of the Global Challenges Research Fund, after its sudden evisceration back in March sparked consternation across the research community.

Two horizons

Finally, there is a specified budget line for the UK’s participation in European research programmes, totalling £6.9bn from 2021 to 2025. This provides welcome assurance as to how the UK will meet the costs of Horizon Europe. But with final agreement on the UK’s association now snarled in the political impasse over the Northern Ireland Protocol, the path to the horizon is not yet clear.

UK researchers and businesses are being told to continue applying for funding as if we were formally associated, but the ongoing political problems will make UK partners less attractive to EU consortia and collaborators. This will exacerbate the downward trend in UK participation in EU research funding since 2016, with the exception of the European Research Council, to which researchers apply as individuals.

If this drags on into 2022, it may force a reappraisal of whether this £6.9bn is best spent through Horizon Europe or other domestic schemes—what science minister George Freeman calls his ‘Plan B’.

I spoke to a well-placed Treasury insider on the day of the spending review. He made it obvious where the government’s preferences lie.

“We’d be delighted,” he said, “if the research community turned around and told us they would now prefer us to invest that money directly in the UK system, and in extra support for international collaboration.” This, he suggested, would be more reliable and attractive than “inefficient, labyrinthine and unpredictable” EU schemes with “massive overheads”.

Many researchers would disagree, pointing to the collaborative opportunities and other benefits of EU programmes. My Treasury source stressed that there is no intention to row back on the UK’s commitment to association.

But the spending review casts the choice between this and Plan B more starkly. Sentiment in the UK research community may shift if delays persist and participation in EU programmes continues to fall.

Inputs and outcomes

Cheering the spending review doesn’t mean ignoring the pressures and dilemmas that lie ahead. Three tensions in research policy seem particularly acute.

The first is between a focus on inputs and institutions over outcomes and strategy. Since 2016, political and policy debate around research has been dominated by the size and scale of public investment and the institutional arrangements for spending it (including EU association).

Now that the spending review has settled some of this, attention needs to pivot towards the outcomes that the UK wants and needs from its R&D system, and the strategy to deliver these.

Here the signals remain mixed. The R&D Roadmap, announced in draft last summer as “the start of a big conversation”, looked as if it might become a point of strategic coherence, but seems to have been abandoned. And even as the system adapts to a flurry of institutional changes, including the creation of UK Research and Innovation in 2017-18 and the announcement of the not-yet-operational Advanced Research and Invention Agency in 2020-21, there is now the prospect of further tinkering through a review of the R&D landscape led by Paul Nurse, reprising his 2015 role.

There are valid arguments for greater institutional diversity in the UK R&D system. But there is also a pressing need to invest more and invest smarter in what is already working well.

On the biggest challenges, more work is needed to join the dots between ambition, investment and a fully formed strategy of the kind that then-chancellor Gordon Brown attempted with his 10-year framework for science and innovation in 2004.

How to ensure that extra public investment is matched by even larger increases in business R&D? How can R&D help to level up the UK economy and boost productivity? How can a policy discourse dominated by science and engineering be reconciled with an economy based largely in services?

The coming months may bring more clarity. UKRI’s long-awaited strategy is imminent, even as a fresh triennial review of how effectively it is working gets underway. There are some smart people working on R&D policy inside Number 10 and the Treasury, and Freeman is capable and experienced.

The new National Science and Technology Council met last week for the first time, chaired by the prime minister and attended by ministers across government, chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance and UKRI chief executive Ottoline Leyser. Its focus will be cross-government and departmental R&D priorities, but it should act as a force for broader policy cohesion.

Hard and soft power

A second area of tension is between the soft-power benefits of investment in research and international collaboration, and a harder-edged view of the role of science and innovation in defence, security and foreign policy.

The dance between these is as old as science itself but, post-Brexit, the government is taking a harder line than its predecessors. This is reflected in March’s Integrated Review—perhaps the most significant science policy document of the Johnson government, and the clearest articulation of its science-superpower philosophy.

The tension is reflected in debates over Horizon Europe, and in the shift to a more hawkish stance on R&D collaboration with China. It also brings the Cabinet Office’s new Office for Science and Technology Strategy to the fore.

The OSTS, which is now up and running with a small team of civil servants and staff seconded from the military and security services, has a remit to identify opportunities that align with post-Brexit economic and foreign policy priorities. Its advice could determine the fate of a thick slice of the extra £4.4bn for departmental R&D announced in the spending review.

These may be sensible priorities. But as Ben Johnson, former BEIS adviser, described recently in Research Fortnight, there is a growing chasm between the research community’s “naive belief that the arc of history is bending towards a Star Trek future of global cooperation” and the government’s stance, which is “more Han Solo than Jean-Luc Picard”.

The smartest-guy problem

Early last month, the Commons inquiry into early failures in the government’s response to Covid-19 highlighted the pitfalls of groupthink and overreliance on narrow expertise. These lessons should lead to lasting improvements in the way the UK designs and manages its approach to science-for-policy, just as the failures over BSE and GM crops did a generation earlier.

Yet, on the other side of the fence, in the realm of policy for science and research, there is less sign of epistemic humility. For Nurse to be reviewing the research landscape for a second time in seven years—particularly when his last effort was methodologically weak and devoid of evidence—reflects a broader tendency in the UK for a relatively small group to exercise huge influence over the design and direction of the entire system.

Politicians and their advisers seem endlessly susceptible to what Stian Westlake, former adviser to several science ministers and now chief executive of the Royal Statistical Society, calls the “smartest guys in the room” approach to policy.

As he wrote in 2015: “The people who get the roundtable invites are typically alpha scientists: prestigious Nobel laureates, heads of learned societies and university vice-chancellors. They’re academic silverbacks (of both genders), the smartest guys (and gals) in the room. These are people who are not only ‘good at science’ but also extraverted and comfortable with dealing with committees. Ministers on the whole like to please them.” 

The longer I observe and occasionally participate in UK R&D policymaking, albeit from the cheap seats reserved for social scientists, the more I see the smartest guys in the room as an obstacle to progress.

I say this not to disparage the individuals; Paul Nurse is a brilliant scientist, research leader and genuinely lovely man. My objection is methodological. If only the smartest guys could apply the same standards of rigour and evidence they apply to their own research to their interventions in policy.

Call for evidence

It was heartening to hear John Kingman reflect in the summer about how much R&D policy “tends to turn on [the] gut feel of the individuals involved, [rather] than on hard evidence and analysis”. But it would have been more helpful if he had tackled this head-on during his five years as chair of UKRI, rather than mention it as he was heading out the door.

For now, in far too many areas of R&D policy, evidence remains optional: what matters more is the story about science, technology and research one tells, and the extent to which this reinforces wider myths of innovation and nationhood.

A huge effort has gone into winning the argument for extra R&D investment in the spending review. I hope that government and the research community can now allocate a tiny sliver of the same effort to improving the evidence and data that will enable us to use this extra money in effective ways.

Rather than leaping to redesign our institutions every six months, let’s take this as an opportunity to build a culture of testing, evaluation and experimentation with how we support, grow and sustain R&D. And let’s draw more openly and systematically on the collective intelligence, insight and expertise that researchers across the UK can bring to these tasks.

James Wilsdon is digital science professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield and director of the Research on Research Institute

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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How the technology will impact academic life is poorly understood, say Jennifer Chubb and colleagues

Research funders worldwide are exploring how artificial intelligence might enable new methods, processes, management and evaluation. Some, such as the Research Council of Norway, are already using machine learning and AI to make grant management and research processes more efficient.

A review by the UK’s public funder UK Research and Innovation, to give another example, suggested that AI might “allow us to do research differently, radically accelerating the discovery process and enabling breakthroughs”. The UK’s National AI Strategy, published in September, reinforces this approach.

But there are concerns about potential downsides, such as reinforcing biases and degrading working life. AI might turbo-charge research, or it might drive a narrow idea of academic productivity and impact defined by bureaucracy and metrics, replacing human creativity and judgement in areas such as peer review and admissions.

To better understand AI’s future in academia, we interviewed 25 leading scholars from a range of disciplines, who identified positive and negative consequences for research and researchers, both as individuals and collectively.

So far, AI is used mostly in research to help with narrow problems, such as looking for patterns in data, increasing the speed and scale of analyses, and forming new hypotheses. One interviewee described its labour-saving potential as “taking care of the more tedious aspects of the research process, like maybe the references of a paper or just recommending additional, relevant articles”.

Another strong theme was that, by analysing large bodies of texts and drawing links between papers, AI systems can aid interdisciplinary research by matchmaking across disciplines. AI is also seen as a way to boost the impact of multidisciplinary research teams, support open innovation and public engagement, develop links beyond academia and broaden the reach of research through technology. All of these can enhance the civic role of universities.

Some foresaw a revolution in citizen science, enabling projects that reshaped their priorities in response to participants’ interests and behaviours. One interviewee noted the possibility of “co-creation between a human author and AI that then creates a new type of story”.

The question remains, though, as to whether these efficiency gains will just feed fiercer competition, forcing researchers to run even faster to stand still—or possibly replace them altogether. AI’s labour-saving potential will also come at the cost of privacy, through the gathering of large amounts of personal data.

Our interviewees were fairly confident that AI would not replace established academic labour. The technology was, though, seen as a potential threat to more precarious groups, such as those in the arts and humanities, and early career researchers. Elsewhere in the university workforce, ‘white collar’ data-based jobs were felt to be more at risk of automation than manual work.

Transparency is crucial

As technology has a bigger role in funding decisions, our research underlines that it is critical that such applications are introduced transparently and gain the trust of the academic community. Care must be taken not to disadvantage particular groups by reinforcing pre-existing biases.

With AI already having a profound impact on how scientific research is done, there is an acute need for a greater understanding of its effects on researchers and their creativity. We need to balance research quality and researchers’ quality of life with demands for impact, measurement and added bureaucracy. The research policy expert James Wilsdon has drawn parallels between understanding and regulating AI in research and the effort to make sure that metrics and indicators are used responsibly.

Further steps are needed to examine the effects of AI and machine learning. This requires the research policy community to develop and test different approaches to evaluation and funding decisions, such as randomisation and automated decision-making techniques.

Beyond this, studies of the role of AI in research need to go much further, and ask fundamental questions about how the technology might provide new tools that enable scholars to question the values and principles driving institutions and research processes.

The UK’s National AI Strategy, for example, emphasises the need to “recognise the power of AI to increase resilience, productivity, growth and innovation across the private and public sectors”, but contains little on whether this makes life any better. 

We must be willing to ask whether AI in the workplace supports human flourishing and creativity or impedes it.

The report on which this piece is based can be found here.

Jennifer Chubb is a research fellow at the University of York; Darren Reed is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of York; and Peter Cowling is professor of AI at Queen Mar, University of London

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Starmer’s science policy should also prioritise climate, biomedicine and a digital NHS, says Melanie Smallman

Keir Starmer’s speech to the Labour conference in Brighton is his first real chance to lay out his vision for the party. So, with science still playing such an important role in our path out of the pandemic, what should Labour focus on as it develops its science and technology policy?

Covid has exposed the UK’s stark levels of inequality and insecurity. These might not seem like issues for science, but they are. Science and innovation are drivers of economic growth, but it’s a particular kind of growth: well-paid tech jobs tend to reward well-educated men. 

This can distort housing markets and displace families. New technologies in public services often replace low-skilled jobs, diverting money from local taxpayers to global corporations that often pay little tax in the UK. 

This does not mean we should not support innovation. Instead, Labour needs to think about innovation’s role in driving inequality, and what it means for regional development. 

It is no coincidence that the ‘red wall’ constituencies—the places feeling most left behind—are those outside university towns, typically with less well-educated populations. These places constantly get the dirty end of innovation’s stick.  

As well as pointing education towards high-value jobs and offering training for those who need to reskill, Labour must make sense of how national decisions about innovation and technology shape regional economies and labour markets. 

This should involve adopting more inclusive and cooperative models of innovation and business ownership. Investment and procurement choices should go towards the industries, technologies and companies most likely to reduce inequality.

Green tech

Second, Labour needs to restore the UK’s lead in green tech. The Green Alliance think tank recently calculated that the government was a long way from meeting its 2050 target for net-zero carbon emissions. Innovation is rapidly becoming the best hope for getting there. 

Many businesses are ready and able to contribute. Yet the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, warned in 2019 that policies were failing to incentivise or were even discouraging business investment in low-carbon technologies. A clear commitment to a rapid low-carbon transition could release significant industry investment in green technologies, creating jobs, products and markets.

Biomedical science

Third, Labour needs to pressure the government to repair the damage done to UK biomedical science. Throughout the pandemic, the prime minister has stood shoulder to shoulder with the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer, heaping praise on the researchers at Oxford who helped develop a Covid-19 vaccine. 

Meanwhile, donations to medical charities crashed as events were cancelled and charity shops closed during lockdowns. UK biomedical research has lost £270 million, according to the Association of Medical Research Charities. 

Add to this the £120m hole in UK Research and Innovation’s budget created by this year’s cuts to overseas aid, the recruitment challenges posed by Brexit and the Wellcome Trust’s move to open up funding to the rest of the world, and suddenly the UK’s biomedical science—once world-leading—faces a worrying future. 

Calls for more public funds are likely to go unheeded, particularly given the recent rise in national insurance. But additional funding need not come solely from government: back in 1999, for example, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown cut a deal with the Wellcome Trust to co-fund the Joint Infrastructure Fund. Biomedical charities are open to something similar, promising to match any investment via the Charity Partnership Fund.

Digital NHS

Finally, health. The NHS’s unique store of patient data could be a huge opportunity in health technology. But, as data and science increasingly come to underpin treatment and care, it is also vital to consider if this is the kind of NHS we want. 

The debacle around sharing patient data, which has seen record numbers of patients withdraw consent, needs to be sorted. Patchy data could be disastrous for research and entrench health inequalities. But it is difficult to blame people for withdrawing when it isn’t clear who will be able to access and benefit from the data. 

Citizens understand that decisions about access to their data are also decisions about the future shape of healthcare. Even in opposition, Labour needs to step in on this issue and lead public debate on who should have access to patient data and for what ends—and, ultimately, what a digital NHS should look like. 

Melanie Smallman is an associate professor in the department of science and technology studies at University College London. She is speaking at the Labour conference event “The dignity of labour at the heart of a new economic settlement” on 28 September  

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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A new guide captures a system in flux, say Gavin Costigan and James Wilsdon

For scientists and policymakers overseas—whether collaborators or competitors with the UK, or a combination of the two—the workings of the British research system can seem baffling. 

What exactly is dual support? Why did we merge our research councils into one agency in 2018, and why are we now setting up a funding agency outside of that? And what’s our role in Horizon Europe after Brexit? 

Earlier this year, the Foundation for Science and Technology, a charity focused on R&D policy, was asked by the Japanese Embassy in London to produce a simple guide to the UK system: to describe how it fits together, and where it’s going next. It’s now freely available on the foundation’s website.

Drafting such a guide seemed straightforward. Yet a flurry of government initiatives over recent weeks has highlighted the pace of UK research policy—including funding for participation in Horizon Europe; a parliamentary bill to create the new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria); a revamped approach to industrial strategy and substantial cuts to research funded via the aid budget. 

Taking a longer view, three factors have dominated the past decade of UK public policy: austerity, following the 2008 financial crash, Brexit and Covid-19. 

Commitments

The government has promised significant rises in public R&D budgets, pledging to raise domestic expenditure on R&D to 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2027 and boost government R&D spending to £22 billion (€25bn) a year by 2025. But such promises are easier made than kept; we won’t really know how much investment is coming until this autumn’s three-year spending review.

Until then, we rely on what we do know. The government’s draft R&D Roadmap, published in summer 2020, sets out commitments on investments, but also on reducing regional inequalities in R&D, on research culture, on Aria, and on international collaboration post Brexit. 

The last of these has had a bumpy few weeks. It’s still unclear whether funding announced on 1 April to help cover the first year of Horizon Europe participation is a short-term fix, or part of a longer plan. 

Our guide also looks at the rise and (potential) fall of challenge funding. The Strategic Priorities Fund looks safe for now, but the Global Challenges Research Fund is in freefall, and the future of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund is unclear, pending a new Innovation Strategy due in June. 

Tough questions

The new kid on the block is Aria—for which legislation is passing through parliament. Tough questions are being asked: about the agency’s rationale, how it relates to UK Research and Innovation, the overarching public funder created in 2018, and ultimately whether it will deliver the ‘next Google’, or pour £200 million per year down the drain. 

As we gradually emerge from the pandemic, the government is shifting its attention towards rebuilding the economy. The Plan for Growth, published by the Treasury in March, focuses on infrastructure, skills and innovation, boosting lagging regions, net zero emissions, and developing “Global Britain”. All contain huge roles for R&D. 

So, where does all this leave countries looking to collaborate with the UK? Our guide focuses on inputs more than outputs, but it’s worth remembering the UK’s successes, as reflected by highly cited research and globally leading universities. 

The UK has R&D strengths that many countries would love to share. We are and—for the foreseeable future—will remain a leading R&D nation.

And yet risks and uncertainties lie ahead. Outside the EU, the UK will have to work harder to benefit from Horizon Europe. It remains to be seen whether the new Office for Talent can create a genuinely welcoming visa system. And the wave of aid-linked grant cancellations has wrecked projects and partnerships that have taken years to build.

The recent Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, provides further insight into how the government sees R&D. It is packed with talk of the UK as “an S&T superpower”, and an emphasis on beating the competition. Collaboration is more of an afterthought. 

However, in many areas—particularly basic research—collaboration is the most effective way to compete. These and other arguments for broad, stable and long-term investment in our R&D system will need to be made and remade in the months ahead. 

The authors’ report on UK science policy after Brexit is available here

Gavin Costigan is chief executive of the Foundation for Science and Technology, James Wilsdon is the Digital Science professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield and director of the Research on Research Institute, both in the UK

This article also appeared in Research Europe

The post Explaining UK research means shooting at a moving target appeared first on Research Professional News.

Not everyone vital to research has “researcher” in their job title, says Andy Dixon

Weirdly, I quite like the Research Excellence Framework.

I like that despite the bureaucracy, at its heart it is a celebration of research, and of the efforts and creativity of a multinational community across all corners of UK higher education. I like the focus it brings to my work, and the galvanising effect upon individuals and teams to come together in this shared endeavour.

I’m less keen on the minutiae of the guidance, of the technical whys and wherefores, of agonising over a piece of guidance that suggests flexibility but is so scarily broad you’d need to be extremely bold to step outside the conventional ways of presenting research.

I’m also not too keen on the way that an administrative exercise can distract us from the thing itself—the creative, rigorous investigation that makes a difference in our communities and beyond.

So, when an email about the Hidden REF arrived during the final stages of wrangling the University of Portsmouth’s REF submission, it caught my interest and imagination.

Serious and playful

I was a bit circumspect at first—I like a bit of subversion but I don’t want to undermine the work of those involved in the REF. The team at Research England has helped us all over the line in the most challenging of circumstances.

However, my apprehension passed as it became clear that the Hidden REF is both a serious and playful accompaniment to the REF proper, providing an alternative lens through which we can explore the potential future for research assessment.

I was also struck by parallels with discussions around the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers (I’m a member of its strategy group). The group has discussed at length the different audiences and beneficiaries of the Concordat.

We settled on a definition that focused on individuals whose primary job is doing research but allowed for many others who actively engage in research within institutions. That includes postgraduate researchers, staff on teaching and research or teaching-only contracts, clinicians, professional support staff and technicians.

There’s an echo here with current initiatives from both the science minister and UK Research and Innovation. In the former, Amanda Solloway is seeking 101 people doing 101 different jobs that make major contributions to research and innovation, but who are not researchers and innovators.

In the latter, UKRI chief executive Ottoline Leyser is working to debunk the myth of research conducted by lone geniuses. Writing on UKRI’s blog, she has noted that “this community of diverse, complementary talents drives research and innovation, and every member of the community is important”.

Supporting actors

These viewpoints chime with a category of the Hidden REF called Hidden Role, aimed at celebrating the contributions of the many and varied people who help with the design, discovery, delivery and dissemination of research.

These roles can include, but are not limited to, data stewards and managers, librarians, technicians, research software engineers, professional services personnel, research managers and administrators, professional research investment and strategy managers, and lived experience contributors.

If you know of someone who has made a significant contribution to your research, and who you think should be recognised in the Hidden REF, please make a submission on their behalf (ask them first). You only need to write 300 words or so about their contribution.

While the REF deadline has passed, submissions for the Hidden REF are open until 14 May.

Andy Dixon is deputy director of Research and Innovation Services at the University of Portsmouth, and a member of the Hidden REF committee

The post Last chance to celebrate the staff the REF doesn’t reach appeared first on Research Professional News.

Pre-Covid approach to evaluation won’t necessarily work this time, say Gemma Derrick and Julie Bayley

Assuming the government’s roadmap out of lockdown goes to plan, England’s pubs will reopen on 12 April. That’s 12 days after the deadline for submissions to the 2021 Research Excellence Framework.

The run-up to a REF deadline is no picnic in a normal year. Mid-pandemic, with changing deadlines, increased workloads for the academics, and professional services staff preparing submissions, in addition to the daily struggles of lockdown, the nearly fortnight’s gap between submission and first orders seems cruel. 

Worldwide, the academic community is wondering how to compensate for a lost year of productivity and focus. This will require a suite of measures aimed at redressing the inequalities left in the wake of Covid-19. 

Learning how to fairly and sensitively accommodate for this disruption is a challenge for research evaluation systems everywhere. On the one hand, with the REF feeling even less welcome than usual, there’s a temptation to just get it over with. But on the other, and as one of the world’s largest research audit exercises, it is more important than ever that the REF takes the realities of Covid-19 into account. The UK has an early chance to show how to adjust and compensate for the setbacks experienced by researchers globally.

Moving online

REF2021 has already made progress in this direction, extending deadlines and census dates and allowing Covid-mitigation statements alongside regular submissions. What is missing, though, are guidelines about how review panels are expected to adjust their evaluation processes so that good submissions are rewarded while those that bear the scars of the crisis are treated reasonably and fairly. 

It should be the evaluators’ job to gauge the damage done by Covid-19. But the lack of clear guidance on how panels should treat mitigation statements places this burden on applicants. 

Most likely, REF panels will meet virtually. Meeting online will be safer and cheaper than an indoor, poorly ventilated and probably heated discussion with lots of people, some of whom are based overseas. But it brings complications of its own.

When any group thrashes out its disagreements, face-to-face dynamics and non-verbal cues form a huge part of the process. Virtual deliberations risk being less agile and less consistent with previous exercises, making it harder still to decide how to treat Covid-mitigation statements. 

Online meetings will be especially tricky for panels judging research impact, which accounts for 25 per cent of the total mark. Compared with traditional criteria for research excellence, the definition and measurement of impact is much less fixed, and so more up for grabs in each meeting. 

Unexpected impact

More generally, Covid-19 has affected the relationship between science and society in myriad ways. Events planned to capture impact and add value to a case study have been cancelled, delayed or never been scheduled; businesses have failed; people who might have provided testimonials are unavailable, or have sadly died.

The past 12 months have also seen UK researchers produce incredible science and impact—sequencing Covid-19 variants, creating a vaccine, and potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Thanks to the extended deadlines, all of these are countable in REF2021. 

No doubt the pandemic has prompted some interesting game-playing in universities around which case studies to submit. Panels might view impacts related to Covid-19 more favourably, simply because evaluators share the gratitude we all feel towards any research aimed at combating the pandemic. The significance and reach of this work is undeniable to anyone who has survived the past 12 months. It will be even more so if, by the time of evaluations, the panel is able to meet
face-to-face.

So the question remains as to whether and how REF2021 can find a sensitive and fair way to meet the expectations loaded on the exercise pre-pandemic while also accommodating and mitigating for the past year’s disruption to individual researchers, research topics and universities. If those running REF2021 can pull this off, it will set a benchmark for post-Covid evaluation processes that would have a global impact. 

Giving review panels clear guidelines on how to evaluate the effects of the pandemic would be a step in the right direction. Without these, the UK risks embarking on an evaluation process that relies on normal tools that are unfit for our post-Covid new normal.

Gemma Derrick is director of research and a senior lecturer at the Centre for Higher Education Research and Evaluation at Lancaster University. Julie Bayley is director of Research Impact Development at the University of Lincoln

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

The post How do you run the REF in a pandemic? We still don’t know appeared first on Research Professional News.

Government’s actions do not match its ambition to build a science superpower, says Kieron Flanagan

Even though Chancellor Rishi Sunak had little to say about it in his 3 March budget, now is a pivotal moment for UK science and innovation policy. The government, in its quest to make the UK a science superpower, has a plan for substantial growth in public research spending, and has introduced legislation to create an Advanced Research and Invention Agency.

It has also made much of revising the Treasury’s Green Book, which guides spending decisions on major public infrastructure, and of reforming rules on state support for private industry. It recently bought a major stake in OneWeb, a collapsed satellite company as a “significant strategic investment”; it is granting Aria a wide degree of freedom, including to buy stakes in companies; and it is creating a UK Infrastructure Bank to “provide leadership to the market in the development of new technologies”.

Yet the government is also disbanding the Industrial Strategy Council amid a “change in emphasis”, with rumours of a name change for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. This may be part of a tussle between the Treasury and BEIS for control of the ‘levelling up’ agenda to reduce regional inequality, but it also reflects a resurgent scepticism towards the notion of industrial policy. 

We’ve seen this before, when Sajid Javid was business secretary under David Cameron. Some in government clearly still yearn for the ideology and policies of the late 1980s and 90s.

In place of a comprehensive industrial strategy—which was anyway some way off—this back-to-the-future approach might mean ‘science-push’ innovation policy. The government would see its role mainly to fund basic research, albeit with an emphasis on higher risk projects and reduced bureaucracy. Incentives for private R&D spending would be generic, not aimed at any particular technology, sectors or application, along with golden-oldies such as freeports and enterprise zones. 

When these policies were tried before, they did not deliver a highly research-intensive knowledge economy. Rather, they coincided with decline and stagnation in UK R&D intensity. 

The emphasis on invention in government thinking on Aria is telling. The notion that plucky British inventors and entrepreneurs need unshackling from perverse incentives and red tape is deeply embedded in Tory thinking. 

Along with three other members of the current cabinet, business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is an author of Britannia Unchained, the 2012 paean to free-market fundamentalism. He is also an economic historian who wrote a PhD on the recoinage crisis of 1695. Perhaps his view of invention and innovation is based on the patterns of the 17th century rather than the 21st. 

Misunderstanding innovation

The idea that the UK will become more innovative and productive is by getting better at commercialising the discoveries made in universities and research institutes is tempting, and reaches far beyond the Conservative Party. But it is based on a misunderstanding about how innovation works.

Innovation is a complex process in which the supply of scientific and technological knowledge is only a part. Unlike the 17th century, most R&D today is performed by companies, often very large ones. Innovation is a distributed enterprise, and individual inventors are rare. 

Companies report that the crucial source of knowledge for their own innovations is other companies. The science base acts as a reservoir of knowledge and expertise, an incubator of technology-based firms, and, most importantly, a source of creative and innovative workers. 

Thoughtful public investment in R&D and procurement, along with clever regulation, as part of an industrial policy, could boost firms’ capacity to innovate, including by making better use of the science base. But companies also need encouragement to adopt ideas from elsewhere, raising productivity and creating demand for innovation and innovative workers, hopefully improving the quality of their work in the process. 

A comprehensive industrial strategy would target its initiatives with these goals in mind, to support levelling up around the UK. Without such a strategy, we risk being left with a series of expensive projects that don’t join up, and glossy brochures filled mainly with white space and stock photos. 

The government has proclaimed its ambition for a
post-Brexit economic transformation. But so far, it seems to be retreating to a Thatcherite comfort zone on innovation policy, while restricting levelling up to symbolic relocations of civil service jobs and pork-barrel schemes for Tory MPs. This isn’t going to cut it—no matter how many high-risk individual investments are made. 

Kieron Flanagan is a senior lecturer in the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

The post UK innovation policy is stuck between forward and reverse appeared first on Research Professional News.

MPs should ask Dominic Cummings why his pet funding agency is needed, says James Wilsdon

Trying to make sense of proposals for a new research funding agency over the past 18 months has been like watching a painfully slow game of pass the parcel. Every couple of months, the music stops and a minister rips open another layer of paper. If we’re lucky, something shiny or sweet falls out. And then the game restarts.

In Italian, ‘aria’ means air—and the worry persists that underneath the wrapping, that’s all there is. Hot air, sweetened by the giddy scent of post-Brexit techno-nationalism.

On Wednesday morning, MPs on the Commons Science and Technology (S&T) Committee will get a rare sniff at perfumer-in-chief Dominic Cummings, with an opportunity to question him about an idea that first emerged in a lengthy essay published on his blog in 2018.

I’ll finish with some questions MPs should ask both Cummings and business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, who is appearing after him. But first, let’s remind ourselves how we got here.

Risky business

Cummings’ post focused on a period in the history of the US Advanced Research Projects Agency—between 1962 and 1975—that he regarded as extraordinarily productive, and a potential blueprint for science and innovation funding in the UK.

A year later, Cummings was inside Number 10 as one of prime minister Boris Johnson’s most influential advisers, with a WhatsApp profile that reputedly summarised his priorities in government as “Get Brexit done, then ARPA”. And despite its unusual genesis, the process to “do ARPA” started well.

In October 2019, Johnson included a commitment to “a new approach to funding emerging fields of research and technology, broadly modelled on the US Advanced Research Projects Agency” in his inaugural Queen’s Speech. A few weeks later, the idea reappeared in the Conservative Party’s 2019 election manifesto as a “new agency for high-risk, high-payoff research”.

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (of which more later) we know that, over the autumn of 2019, Number 10 was circulating a three-page note sketching out the idea. Soon after, a “shadow ARPA” team began to work it up in more detail.

By March 2020, they had arrived at a number—£800 million over four years—that was duly included in chancellor Rishi Sunak’s spring budget. Three months later, in a speech in Dudley, Johnson announced again that he would invest “at least £800m in a new blues-skies funding agency”.

The phrase was repeated, with a few lines of vague explanation, in the draft R&D Roadmap published on 1 July 2020. Policy wonks earnestly debated whether the “at least” signalled a future smash-and-grab raid on UK Research and Innovation’s budget.

Roll forward four months, and the November 2020 one-year spending review offered no new detail other than to allocate UK Research and Innovation “the first £50m towards an £800m investment…in high-risk, high-payoff research”. Quizzed about the new agency by the Commons S&T Committee that month, science minister Amanda Solloway admitted that, “Being frank with you, we are still working through a few of these particular questions.”

The shadow ARPA team must have had a busy Christmas, because by February 2021, they had settled on a name—the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria)—to put alongside the number unveiled 11 months earlier. Mere days later came a draft bill, the primary legislation required to bring the new agency into existence, which is now awaiting its second reading.

Clarity lacking

But even with a 14-page bill to chew over, what we still lack—remarkably—is clarity over the purpose and functions of the new agency, and its relationship to existing structures within the UK R&D system. The Commons S&T Committee highlighted this gap in its report last month, describing Aria as “a brand in search of a product”.

There are, of course, no shortage of proposals flying around for what it could do. The think tank Policy Exchange assembled several at the start of 2020. More recent workable options have come from, among others, the Confederation of British Industry, the Russell Group and former Innovate UK boss Ruth McKernan.

But, as one might expect, these are frequently contradictory. It’s hard to see how a single agency could simultaneously be an “international lynchpin for business investment…and ultimately deliver new products” (the CBI), a funder of “multidisciplinary research teams with the capacity to take a holistic approach” to complex problems (the Russell Group) and a “public sector new technology seed fund” (McKernan).

And all this for the bargain price of £200m a year—around 1 per cent of the UK’s total public R&D budget, assuming the government hits its target of £22 billion a year.

Fudge now, trouble later

It is bizarre that such basic choices over Aria’s function remain unresolved even as it enters into legislation. And worrying that in fudging these issues now, the government and the research community are storing up problems down the line.

The bill does little to clear things up, essentially giving ministers and the leadership of Aria carte blanche to set purposes and functions at a later date. As one official at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy explained to me last month: “We would quite like it to take a view itself about where it invests across the TRL [technology readiness level] spectrum.”

This was intended to reassure, but left me more sceptical. For a start, how can ministers identify and recruit the right leaders for Aria without answering these questions?

The skills and experience required to lead a multidisciplinary research agency are very different to those required to run something more applied and close to industry, or something that operates like a venture fund.

Such fuzziness is even more problematic when combined with Aria’s proposed exemptions from normal accountability mechanisms, including Freedom of Information legislation.

At best, this is a recipe for constrained modes of decision-making, and soft capture by vested interests within academia, industry or government. At worst, it could enable corruption of the kind seen in the awarding of public contracts during the pandemic, or the pork-barrel approach to the distribution of “levelling up” funds and other regional schemes.

Room for improvement?

Where I have more sympathy for the architects of Aria is in their argument that conventional mechanisms for allocating research funding—such as priority-setting, consultation and expert-led peer review—sometimes inhibit risk-taking.

These are perennial debates in research policy, and I would support efforts to pilot and test new methods for allocation and evaluation. My own Research on Research Institute is engaged in several such projects—for example, trials of lotteries and randomised modes of allocation.

But just as Winston Churchill observed that democracy was “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”, so one might say the same of peer review in funding allocation. Imperfection is not a reason for abandonment.

The legislative case for Aria appears to rest on the assertion that it is difficult or impossible to fund “high-risk, high-reward” research in the existing system. That would include via the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act, which created UKRI and was presented at the time as the most significant reform to the research system in decades—not least by the prime minister’s brother, Jo, who was then science minister and took the act through parliament.

I don’t accept this argument, and I have seen little evidence presented for it. Large amounts of existing R&D funding goes to speculative and risky projects and proposals. One could argue that this is one of the main purposes of the public funding system.

Most of the evidence suggests that the biggest barrier over the past decade to agile, risk-taking UK R&D funding has been a shortage of sustained investment, both public and private, rather than a surplus of peer review or excessively transparent decision-making.

The National Audit Office agrees, noting in its response to proposals for a new agency that “it is not unique for public money to be spent on programmes where the payback may be highly uncertain and where ultimate success may not be known for some years”.

Through the months of debate that accompanied the creation of UKRI, there was no suggestion from government or elsewhere that the new integrated agency would be unable to fund in this way. Indeed, reading back through the 2014 Nurse Review and all that followed, one finds much of the same language of “novel funding mechanisms”, “promoting agility”, “freeing up research and innovation leaders”, “transformative scientific and technological advances” and “significant social and economic benefits”.

Four questions

Given Cummings’ well-known disdain for parliamentary scrutiny, the committee hearing is a rare opportunity for MPs to poke at these ambiguities and contradictions in public.

So let me end with four questions that I hope the S&T Committee will ask:

• What empirical evidence is there of the problems in the UK’s R&D system to which the Aria bill is the solution?
• If these problems can be evidenced, why is the government prioritising the creation of a new agency with 1 per cent of the public R&D budget, rather than fixing shortcomings in how the other 99 per cent is spent?
• At a time when, owing to cuts in overseas development aid, UKRI has just announced significant cuts to the Global Challenges Research Fund and Newton Fund, is it sensible to be diverting £200m a year to a new agency?
• Why does the ideal research funding agency perpetually lie just over the rainbow, drawing attention and energy away from evaluating and improving the structures we have?

If the government gets anywhere near its goal of doubling public R&D investment by 2025, there will be good reason to innovate and experiment in modes of funding and evaluation.

But for all the talk of novelty and risk-taking, the case for Aria has so far been set to a familiar tune, based on stale tropes and weakly evidenced assertions. Can Cummings and Kwarteng sing us something new?

James Wilsdon is digital science professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield and director of the Research on Research Institute

The post Aria is an oldie, but there’s no sign it will be a hit appeared first on Research Professional News.

Ethical issues around certification cut across scales of space and time, says Cian O’Donovan

What harms will vaccine passports cause, and can we have official proofs of Covid-19 vaccination by the summer?

The European Commission is promising answers later this month, in its proposal for a Digital Green Pass. The UK government is reviewing a similar scheme. 

More than 250,000 people in the UK have signed a petition opposing vaccination passports. But holiday firms, travel industry lobbyists and suppliers of passport infrastructure take a different view. 

At stake are not only issues of freedom and harms, but the often-unforeseen effects of new and complex data infrastructures.

Freedom versus harms

Vaccine passports have become a divisive issue among ethicists and technology policy wonks. Big hitters such as the Royal Society and Ada Lovelace Institute have offered expert deliberation and sets of principles, but consensus is distant. Half the German Ethics Council say vaccine passports would never be ethically acceptable, while the other half thinks they may be. 

One debate is over freedom versus harms. Arguments have pitched personal liberty against concerns over fairness; freedom for some may mean more policing and profiling of racial, sexual, religious and other minorities. 

But commentary on the impact on people and groups tends to overlook the effects of technologies across scales. This matters because impact at scale is what makes vaccine passports so alluring, promising society-wide benefits at what looks like low monetary and political cost. 

Understood this way, the passport per se is not the issue. What’s at stake is the creation of a set of infrastructures. 

These infrastructures compile health data, such as vaccine and immunity status, and connect people’s identities to a certification system, permitting verification worldwide. And they allow inspectors to decide where a person can and cannot go. 

Some will see these systems as a route to summer sun; others as an illegitimate overreach. But evaluation must consider the scales at which these systems work, and how they interact. 

That means asking questions like: do vaccine passports fit with how we want our infrastructures organised? Will they be locally or centrally run? How are governance and accountability managed? How will the system’s public and private parts fit together? 

In other words, who benefits, who pays, and who do we blame when something goes wrong?

Those in favour of vaccine passports often highlight the benefits at a national or international scale—opening up the economy and protecting population health. But the risks at these scales get less of a hearing. Would passports increase inequality, and how would we know? How might they affect broader processes of democracy and will they respect national cultures and institutions? 

Global ramifications

International infrastructure raises its own issues. Whose laws apply and whose courts will adjudicate? Would some nations become more, or less, dependent on others? Who sets standards and to whom are they accountable? And how might vaccine passports relate to the Sustainable Development Goals and similar global programmes?

In a globalised world, one way to answer these questions is by developing technical standards that embody shared rules, practices and design principles. The World Health Organization has convened a group of global experts to draw up plans. But the WHO is not the only game in town—tech blue-chips like IBM, travel industry lobbyists like the International Air Transport Association and health startups such as CommonHealth are also in on the action. 

Arguably, large complex infrastructures have their most important effects across time. Yet most discussions of immunity certificates have taken a short-term view, with a time horizon lasting no more than a year or two. 

Experience shows that once an infrastructure is in place, it tends to stick around. Decisions on immunity certification today could lock in features and exclusions for years to come.

The task, then, is to assess how vaccine passports affect our freedoms and wellbeing across a complex web of certification infrastructure. 

Evaluators might be led by values of humility and democracy, as well as concerns for liberty and fairness. Useful guidance comes from understanding a policy’s complexities across a diversity of scales. Nobody knows enough to devise principles that are both generally applicable and specific enough to guide practice. 

This creates a need for inter- and transdisciplinary evaluation that will consider the implications of vaccine passports across all scales. The terms of assessment, and the categories of impact considered, need to be broader than at present.  

Cian O’Donovan is a researcher at the UK Ethics Accelerator, working from the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Talk with—not at—the public, or risk losing the argument again, says Jack Stilgoe

British scientists are, it’s safe to say, pro-EU. However, during the Brexit spasms, one corner of the scientific community could see a possible upside.

Some scientists working on genetic engineering for agriculture have long been frustrated by European regulations which they felt held back their experiments. For these researchers, and the agricultural biotechnology companies that commercialise their work, Brexit provides an opportunity.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has announced it is consulting on new rules aimed at boosting agricultural innovation.

Defra is flirting with technologies that offer more precise genetic modification. Environment secretary George Eustice told a farming conference that “gene-editing has the ability to harness the genetic resources Mother Nature has provided, in order to tackle the challenges of our age”.

But for all Eustice’s attempts to rebrand this technology, the public history of genetic modification still looms over him.

Lessons learned?

Gideon Henderson, Defra’s chief scientific adviser, has called for a new public debate on genetically modified (GM) crops. The suspicion is that he’s mainly looking for a different answer from the one they got last time.

Henderson says the last proper debate took place in the 1990s, which isn’t quite right. There was indeed plenty of argument in the 90s, as British and European consumers and non-governmental organisations rebelled against modified foods in which they saw little benefit.

But there have also been many attempts to organise more constructive discussions since. Defra should recall a decades-long history of public conversation around genetic modification: some polite, some angry.

In 2011, I led a review of public dialogue on GM crops for Sciencewise, a government agency with expertise in deliberation on new technologies. The review was spurred by an aborted attempt at public dialogue by the Food Standards Agency in 2009; we were tasked with extracting the lessons from UK consultations and dialogues dating back to 1994.

The review showed that public concerns, which were already clear in the mid-90s, did not just relate to safety or to a nebulous Frankensteinian idea of playing with nature.

People also worried about who owned these technologies, and who might benefit from them. They were concerned about the effects of new crops on existing ecosystems and economic structures. They were sceptical about the humanitarian claims that GM crops would help feed the world, including its poorest citizens.

But the bigger lesson was that public dialogue, if it is to be trusted and constructive, has to be an actual dialogue. People don’t want to be force-fed new technologies, nor do they want to be told what they should and shouldn’t talk about.

Modified approach

Scientists are now optimistic that the technology has moved on, and that this will allay public concerns. Today’s gene-editing is more precise than old-school genetic modification and creates the possibility of tinkering with a species’ genome, without having to borrow genes from other species.

The hope is that this type of modification will worry people less than transgenic techniques that inserted genes from fish into tomatoes—a technology that was never commercialised, but which allowed campaigners to conjure up some vivid images.

When the CRISPR/Cas9 system for easy gene-editing arrived, biotechnologists couldn’t contain their enthusiasm. The technique seemingly allowed genetic modification, without having to be labelled as genetic modification.

The European Commission disagreed, classifying gene-edited plants as genetically modified organisms, enmeshing them in regulations. Scientists have been trying to persuade them otherwise.

The tenor of the discussion within the scientific community doesn’t bode well for public debate. Scientists should focus less on whether they can evade regulations and more on the novelty of their interventions.

Credibility problem

New technologies raise new questions. As with the first generation of GM crops, people will be more interested in what the technology is for than in how it is regulated.

If scientists are seen as more interested in slipping their regulatory shackles than having a constructive discussion about the future of agriculture, their credibility will crack. Campaign groups such as GM Watch and GM Freeze have already responded to Defra with concerns that industry could use gene-editing as a trojan horse to smuggle in their old tech.

Gene-editing also raises new possibilities for modified animals in agriculture, which raises additional concerns about animal welfare. Liz O’Neill, director of GM Freeze, has argued that the process of consultation and public debate looks careless.

A new public debate is welcome, but if the government isn’t careful, it risks having—and losing—the same arguments it lost last time around.

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The Political Science bloggers pick the books that helped them get to grips with 2020

Gemma Derrick

As 2020 is the year of Covid-19, it’s no surprise that my reading sought out tools with which to make sense of this mess and to prepare ourselves for a new normal. Enter Knowing Our Limits by Nathan Ballantyne. 

Many books published on the brink of the pandemic became instantly obsolete. Ballantyne’s became more relevant, despite not mentioning Covid-19 once.

Ballantyne presents a rigorous case for questioning the limits of knowledge and decision making from the perspectives of philosophy and cognitive science. His title could be a guiding principle for a year in which data has driven policy decisions against a background of competing manifestos about how to balance public and economic health and the chuntering of armchair epidemiologists blurring fact and anecdote.

Regardless of whose ‘truth’ you choose to accept, this book provides a tool for inquiry, pointing towards an inclusive regulative epistemology. It’s a unique intellectual blend, at a time when the lines between medical and social sciences have become more porous and less meaningful in science’s collective ambition to fight Covid-19, medically, socially and economically.

Gemma Derrick is director of research and a senior lecturer at the Centre for Higher Education Research and Evaluation at Lancaster University

Kieron Flanagan

I’ve spent more time reading in 2020 than usual, not because of the pandemic but because I’m on sabbatical. Much of that has involved revisiting the history of 20th century science and technology in an effort to put today’s policy debates into context.

It’s been interesting, for example, to compare this year’s debates about the need for a UK Advanced Research Projects Agency with John Hendry’s 1989 account of the early history of government support for the UK’s emerging computer industry, Innovating for Failure.

The same goes for Arthur Norberg and Judy O’Neil’s authoritative history of the Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office, Transforming Computer Technology, and Mitchell Waldrop’s personality-driven account of some of the same initiatives, The Dream Machine.

I have managed to look at a few 2020 books. Juan Du’s The Shenzhen Experiment punctures the myth of the ‘instant city’ created by political fiat, tracing the long economic and social history of the place that became Shenzhen. Sharon Zukin’s The Innovation Complex is an even-handed investigation of New York’s pursuit of technology as an engine of economic renewal, exploring not only the shiny promises but also the many pitfalls of such a strategy.

Another new book, Fully Grown, by US economist Dietrich Vollrath, provocatively and persuasively argues that the growth slowdown seen in the US, and by implication other advanced economies, has little to do with declining innovation, lack of investment or competition from rising powers such as China.

Rather, it has everything to do with long-term demographic and structural changes reflecting material and social improvements—an ageing population, more career opportunities for women, and a shift in consumption towards services. Slow growth, Vollrath argues, is a sign of success rather than a warning of failure.

Finally, I should mention the excellent Who’s Driving Innovation, by Jack Stilgoe, a fantastic little book that looks under the hood of the techno-determinist discourse about self-driving cars to uncover how technological change is shaped, and how the process could be governed to achieve a more equitable division of risks and benefits.

Kieron Flanagan is a senior lecturer in the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester

Jack Stilgoe

This was the year when so many of us realised our dependence on digital technology and the downsides of that addiction. As policymakers pondered how to tame the power of Big Tech, some important books took aim at this new centre of power.

Adrian Daub, a literature professor at Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley, attempted to understand What Tech Calls Thinking and found buzzwords where a philosophy should be. Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley took us behind the shiny façade of some of tech’s biggest players to look at the “dark triad: capital, power and a black, overcorrected heterosexual masculinity”. She anonymised her characters, but some of the individuals and many of the personality types are instantly recognisable.

Another former insider, Wendy Liu, was more strident in Abolish Silicon Valley and Cory Doctorow’s online book, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism offered a radical prescription.

Ivana Bartoletti explored the political questions raised by artificial intelligence in An Artificial Revolution and Aaron Benanav asked us to take our thinking about Automation and the Future of Work beyond calls for a universal basic income.

In Why we Drive, Matthew Crawford offered a conservative case against self-driving cars, a useful reminder that the desire for autonomous machines could soon clash with people’s desire to be autonomous individuals.

Big Tech companies should take note. But the depressing implications from these books is that, left to their own devices, they won’t bother.

Jack Stilgoe is an associate professor of science and technology studies at University College London

James Wilsdon

My book of the year is The Innovation Delusion by Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell, which I devoured as a much-needed antidote to the toxic techno-nationalist guff that has emanated from UK ministers over the course of the pandemic. Vinsel and Russell are the prime movers behind The Maintainers, a network of researchers interested in concepts of maintenance, infrastructure and repair, and their book sets out with compelling clarity how our constant exaltation of the new has distracted attention and diverted resources from the things that matter most.

It reminded me in one or two places of David Edgerton’s stinging 2007 provocation, The Shock of the Old. But in a year when the UK government’s response to Covid-19 has lurched between spasms of techno-hype—over ventilators, apps and its ‘world-beating’ test and trace system—while failing on so many of the basics, Vinsel and Russell made me sigh, snarl, smile and cheer.

I’ve also been limbering up for the inevitable post-pandemic public inquiry with the help of the 2020 edition of Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. This classic account of cognitive dissonance and self-justification has been updated with a fresh chapter on ‘Dissonance, democracy and the demagogue’, aimed primarily at the polarisation of political discourse in the United States, but with obvious resonance here too.

Other books I’ve enjoyed include Peter Mandler’s The Crisis of the Meritocracy—a brilliant and deeply researched account of how the UK’s education system has transformed since 1945 to embrace mass participation. With the political mood swinging back towards grammar school-style selection and limits on student numbers, one wonders how far the progress Mandler describes will be thrown into reverse?

Finally, I was deeply moved by Mayflies, Andrew O’Hagan’s semi-autobiographical meditation on lifelong friendship, terminal illness and death. I read it together with one of my oldest and closest friends, who has spent 2020 moving inexorably towards his own death from motor neurone disease. In a period that for many of us has been marred by sickness and loss, but also by proximity and care for those we hold dearest, sharing reactions to Mayflies—my friend’s spelt out by text, using only his eyes, from a lockdowned hospice—was for me one of the bittersweet highlights of a bittersweet year.

James Wilsdon is director of the Research on Research Institute and digital science professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield

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We know what the government wants, but not how it’ll get there, says Kieron Flanagan

The research community’s expectations for Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s 25 November spending review were high, even after the announcement was downgraded from a multi-year settlement to a one-year stopgap. But with the departure of Dominic Cummings from the Downing Street set-up, many were worried that losing the driving force behind the government’s R&D agenda might mean the end of that agenda. 

This says more about the goldfish memories and lack of political understanding of some research leaders than it does about the actual battles playing out over public spending. The commitment to raising UK R&D spending to 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2027 predates the arrival of Cummings and Boris Johnson in No 10. 

The government and Tory party still contain a strong constituency for austerity, but the longer-term economic challenges that drove the shift in attitudes towards government R&D spending will outlive Cummings. These include finding a new economic model outside the European Union, and tackling the post-financial crisis productivity puzzle, to say nothing of an ageing population and transitioning to a low-carbon future. Indeed, most of these problems take on new significance post-Covid.

In the end, the stopgap spending review did provide a three-year outlook for the core research budget, promising a £400 million increase each year over a three-year period. Assuming that other government departments do not slash their R&D spending, this looks more or less in line with the manifesto pledge to spend £18 billion on public R&D by 2024-25.

The spending review reaffirmed the 2.4 per cent target, although without giving a cash target for government spending, be it £18bn or the recently floated £22bn. However, the prime minister did appear to restate the £22bn target in parliament two days earlier, in answer to a question on his Commons statement on the Covid-19 Winter Plan.  

UK Arpa rethink

The chancellor also confirmed that Cummings’ pet project, a UK version of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is still going ahead, with a modest start-up budget of £50 million allocated to UK Research and Innovation for next year. This either signals a rethink of the notion that this UK Arpa should be outside the supposedly deadening bureaucracy of UKRI or simply that UKRI’s hiring, finance and procurement systems provide a platform for establishing a new body rapidly.

So there is some reassurance that the government remains committed to raising the UK economy’s R&D intensity, although few details about how it plans to get there. Pushing spending increases into the future presents challenges in this respect, given that doubling publicly funded research implies a need for many more researchers in both the public and private sectors. 

New researchers need to be trained or imported, but a boom in PhD and postdoc numbers could create challenges of its own. And, apart from an increase in defence R&D, we know nothing about broader government research spending beyond the science budget, although the move to allow government-owned public labs to access UKRI funding is an important policy shift that was buried in the document. This had previously been blocked to avoid perversely incentivising the labs’ parent departments to reduce their own funding 

We also don’t know what will happen to the R&D money that is double-counted as overseas development assistance. The government’s temporary abandonment of its development spending target has been taken to mean these programmes will be cut, but again the political logic that drove the alignment between R&D and ODA commitments hasn’t gone away.  

As for the UK Shared Prosperity Fund that will replace European Structural Funds, the little we learned has raised concerns about the amount of money on offer and its suitability for science-related projects. The review also announced a separate English levelling-up fund, which looks to be a pork-barrel fund for small infrastructure projects to help red wall Tory MPs get re-elected. 

What we didn’t learn was any more about how research policy and levelling up will be linked. The danger is that R&D spending will exacerbate inequalities and polarise the labour market further rather than create high-quality jobs across the country. 

We also know little about the demand side of the equation. How will private and public demand and regulation shape this extra public and private R&D so its social and economic impacts are equal to the challenges facing the UK? Time is running out to find an answer. 

Kieron Flanagan is a senior lecturer in the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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No more grand declarations—it’s time for action, say Stephen Curry and James Wilsdon

The stunning interim results of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine trial—hot on the heels of a similar announcement from Pfizer and BioNTech last week—is the best news many of us have had for months. It’s another reminder, if any were needed, of the international research community’s remarkable response to the pandemic.

But before we get swept up in self-congratulation, we should pause to reflect on how this year’s crisis has also illuminated the inner workings of research. In lots of ways, both good and bad, 2020 has intensified scrutiny of how research is funded, practised, disseminated and evaluated, and how research cultures can be made more open, inclusive and impactful.

The uncertain possibilities that flow from this moment follow a period of growing concern over several long-standing problems, all linked to research assessment.

First, there is the misapplication of narrow criteria and indicators of research quality or impact, in ways that distort incentives, create unsustainable pressures on researchers, and exacerbate problems with research integrity and reproducibility.

Second, this narrowing of criteria and indicators has reduced the diversity of research missions and purposes, leading institutions and researchers to adopt similar strategic priorities, or to focus on lower-risk, incremental work.

Third, systemic biases against those who do not meet—or choose not to prioritise—narrow criteria and indicators of quality, impact or career progression, have reduced the diversity, vitality and representative legitimacy of the research community.

Finally, there has been a diversion of policy and managerial attention towards things that can be measured, at the expense of less tangible or quantifiable qualities, impacts, assets and values. The rise of flawed university league tables has exacerbated this trend.

Swelling tide

We’ve been involved in diagnosing, assembling evidence and banging drums about these problems, through initiatives such as the Declaration on Research Assessment (Dora), the Metric Tide report and the UK Forum for Responsible Research Metrics.

So we welcome signs that attention is shifting towards implementing solutions, and coalescing around a more expansive agenda for responsible research assessment (RRA). Early debates on metrics and measurement have expanded to encompass questions about how to create a healthy work culture for researchers, how to promote research integrity, how to move from closed to open scholarship, and how to embed the principles of equality, diversity and inclusion across the research community.

This more holistic approach can be seen, for example, in UK Research and Innovation’s commitment to a healthy research culture, and in the recent guidelines on good research practice from the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Next week’s Global Research Council virtual conference on RRA—hosted by UKRI in  collaboration with the UK Forum for Responsible Research Metrics and South Africa’s National Research Foundation—comes at a pivotal time.

State of play

Ahead of the conference, with our colleagues—Sarah de Rijcke, scientific director and professor of science, technology and innovation at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS); Anna Hatch, programme director at Dora; Gansen Pillay, depurty chief executive officer for the National Research Foundation; and Inge van der Weijden, lecturer and PhD coordinator at CWTS—we’re today publishing a working paper through the Research on Research Institute, intended as both a primer and a conversation starter.

The paper explores what RRA is, and where it comes from, by outlining 15 initiatives that have influenced the content, shape and direction of current debates, and the responses they have elicited. We focus on the role of research funders, who have more freedom and power to experiment and drive change than many other actors in research systems.

We also present the findings of a survey of RRA policies and practices among GRC participant organisations—mostly public funding agencies—with responses from 55 organisations worldwide.

Their responses show a shift away from reliance on metrics towards more qualitative or mixed-methods modes of assessment. Alternative CV formats are now being piloted or implemented by almost 60 per cent of respondents from all regions.

This is real progress, particularly as the conversation has expanded beyond Europe and North America to become genuinely global. Some of the most exciting innovations in RRA are coming out of Latin America and Africa.

Time for action

Declarations and statements of principle have been an important part of this story. But even though we have co-authored some of these, we feel the time for grand declarations has passed. They risk becoming substitutes for action.

RRA now needs to focus on action and implementation—testing and identifying what works in building a healthy and productive research culture. Institutional commitments must be followed by the hard graft of reforming cultures, practices and processes.

The research community also needs an open, global forum where common values and important differences can be articulated and debated, and where emerging good practices can be shared. The Global Research Council is ideally placed to play a role here, bringing in views and voices from across global research.

Whether you’re an advocate, a critic or entirely agnostic about RRA, we hope you’ll join us and more than 500 others in making next week’s conference the start of a fresh chapter in these debates.

Stephen Curry is professor of structural biology and assistant provost for equality, diversity and inclusion at Imperial College London. He is also chair of the Declaration on Research Assessment and a co-author of The Metric Tide

James Wilsdon is Director of the Research on Research Institute and digital science professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield. He chaired the Metric Tide review and the European Commission’s Next Generation Metrics Expert Group, and is a member of the UK Forum for Responsible Research Metrics

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Research is global, and the UK can't make its rules in isolation, says Gemma Derrick

Science minister Amanda Solloway has decided to overhaul the Research Excellence Framework. Not REF 2021, for which universities are rushing to finalise their submissions; the next one.

To those who were hoping to see the REF abolished as a legacy of a pre-pandemic, managerialist perspective, this will be bad news. But, while some of these criticisms are valid, Solloway’s implicit confirmation of the REF’s survival was one of the positive notes of her announcement of 20 October.

Doing away with the REF would sacrifice both its value in making researchers and their institutions publicly accountable, and its potential to drive changes in the UK research landscape.

Many of the mooted reforms are the usual, stalely familiar stuff, such as efforts to include and incentivise a wider range of research outputs beyond journal papers, and an increased emphasis on how research contributes to the economy.

The more novel addition to the future REF wish-list is the minister’s desire to create a kinder, less bureaucratic research culture. The REF, with its huge power to create incentives and shape behaviour, could be a powerful tool for achieving that.

But research and research culture are global—and so is the demand for and definition of research excellence, and individual researchers’ behaviours and norms. They do not change just because the UK moves its goal posts.

Without borders

Action on research culture will only succeed if it is multilateral. There are signs that UK policymakers understand this—later this month, for example, UK Research and Innovation is co-hosting, with the South African National Research Foundation, a virtual conference on responsible research assessment.

It also seems, however, that the government sees UK research as a UK good, and, through initiatives such as creating an Advanced Research Projects Agency, wants to align R&D with its own priorities. This is at odds with creating a kinder research culture; UK research would be grievously undermined if government policy adopted the exceptionalism that has marked its approach to areas such as Covid-19 and Brexit.

Researchers have international ambitions and pursue global markers of esteem. They value collaborating with international colleagues and organisations, and disseminate their research with little regard for national borders. They will continue to do so even if the REF’s definitions of scientific and societal value focus on the national level.

Researchers, in other words, have bigger fish to fry than the ambitions of a short-termist national government. The pressures that shape their work go far beyond those imposed by the REF, and their commitment, quite rightly, is to their research, not to a periodic national exercise that changes from one cycle to the next.

Brain drain

Any political effort to value national goals over international ones will only work to make the UK less attractive to an internationally competitive researcher. Solloway should understand that knowledge moves with people, and people move to where the opportunities are, and to places that share their ideal of research excellence.

If other countries have different notions of research excellence, changes to UK policy will have little effect on where researchers choose to publish, what goals they work towards, or what types of engagement and impact they embrace.

If researchers here can’t do what their international competitors, collaborators and societal partners value, they will go somewhere else. If the UK’s research strategy deems certain types of work as not valuable, the people that do them are likely to be snatched up by other countries looking to strengthen their research base, economic productivity and soft power.

Any moves, for example, to discourage the types of outputs that are considered excellent globally will only accelerate a brain drain that is already underway. Instead of buying into the long process of changing research culture, researchers are more likely to relocate to countries that provide more opportunities and mirror their own perceptions of what constitutes excellent, societally valuable research.

Heal thyself

Above and beyond all this, there are other factors at play that make the UK research community a less kind place to work. The REF and its methods cannot be divorced from the politics surrounding universities and their place in the world. As universities struggle with changes to teaching loads, concerns over budgets and a looming no-deal Brexit, that is more true than ever.

If Solloway wants to change research culture she should start by working to change the culture that researchers work against—one perpetuated by a Conservative government that has had enough of experts, only looks to science during crises, ignores inconvenient evidence, demonises migrants and fosters popularism.

A better, more inclusive research culture is not divorced from broader culture—so how can a government promote equity in one, while fostering intolerance in the other?

All of this, far more than the demands and quirks of the REF, persuades international academics that they are better off working elsewhere.

Over the next few months, as the REF submissions come in, the evaluations start and gather pace, and the UK hopefully starts to recover from the pandemic and grapple with the consequences of Brexit, this blog will be discussing how these political issues and others may influence REF 2021 and preparations for the REF after that. We will also be discussing how the REF influences research culture now, and how it might change research culture.

Gemma Derrick is director of research and a senior lecturer at the Centre for Higher Education Research and Evaluation at Lancaster University

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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Survey of 2021 exercise will help shape future assessments, say Catriona Manville and James Wilsdon

Last month’s call by Nancy Rothwell, vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester and incoming chair of the Russell Group of universities, for more sustainable and agile research funding, was a shot across the bow, signalling a renewed push by research-intensive universities for a funding and assessment system with a lighter touch.

With the government and UK Research and Innovation also signed up to a fresh blitz on bureaucracy, as set out in a recent policy paper from the business and education departments, it is only a matter of time before attention turns again to the design and effectiveness of the Research Excellence Framework as a multi-purpose tool for allocating quality-related funding.

The deadline for submissions to REF2021 is 31 March next year—only six months away—having been extended to ease pressure on universities through the pandemic. Wisely, ministers have chosen to leave the REF alone for now. But once the 2021 cycle is complete, it seems reasonable to expect another root-and-branch review of its purposes, methods, burdens and benefits.

Work in progress

A RAND Europe study last year for Research England, which conducts the REF in partnership with its equivalents in the devolved nations, is a helpful guide to the options likely to be on the table, as assessment processes evolve to reflect wider changes in the research landscape.

In particular, the study highlighted academics’ growing desire to produce a diversity of outputs from their research. This is balanced by an appreciation that journal articles will remain prominent, owing in part to their importance in the reward system for both individuals and institutions.

The study also focused on how technology might support future assessment—in, for example, identifying panel members, supporting eligibility checks and moderating reviews. However, the study concluded, that in the first instance at least, there may be a trade-off between reducing the burden of assessment and increasing the value of the information it produces. That creates a need for the sector to debate its current priorities and aims.

The REF evokes strong reactions, from both its critics and defenders. Formal consultations are often dominated by institutional voices, or by those who shout loudest. The last review of the REF, led by Nicholas Stern in 2016, prompted several changes designed to streamline the process.

Before embarking on a further round of changes, it is important to listen and learn from researchers and managers about what has and has not worked well. We need to understand, with more rigour and detail, how researchers across different disciplines, career stages, institutions and geographies have experienced the 2021 assessment cycle. Where and how has it been implemented well, and what more could be improved?

Real-time review

In 2018, Research England initiated a pilot study across four universities aimed at tapping into this more diverse set of perspectives. This published its findings last year, and recommended that efforts at bottom-up, distributed evaluation—what’s known as the real-time REF—should continue as the 2021 cycle draws to a close.

For this reason, a new and expanded phase of this work is being launched this week. Led by RAND Europe, with the support of Research England and academic partners at Cardiff and Sheffield universities, the Real-Time REF review will evaluate UK researchers’ perceptions of the assessment process while they are preparing and submitting their work to REF2021.

To ensure that the study reflects what’s happening on the ground, we hope to get input from across all disciplines and career stages. Any researcher who is eligible to submit to the REF can participate in the online survey launched today. So please log on and fire away—we are keen to hear what you think.

A cohort of 25 universities, from Aberdeen to Exeter, has also agreed to participate in a more structured way, ensuring that all regions of the UK are represented. The survey will be followed by a series of online focus groups to dig more deeply into prominent perceptions and emerging themes.

Many organisations and individuals will have insights and views as to how the REF should be designed to meet the needs of the UK research system. This study aims to ensure that these voices are heard and can inform a framework that is fit for the future.

Catriona Manville is a research leader at RAND Europe. James Wilsdon is professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield and director of the Research on Research Institute

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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Unexamined assumptions and narrow worldviews riddle everyday academic practice, say Faith Mkwananzi and Melis Cin

The Black Lives Matter movement has sparked debates around structural and institutional racism, exclusion and belonging in the UK, and made discussion of decolonisation and racism a moral and ethical responsibility across society.

Some universities’ first response to the protests was to revive initiatives to decolonise curricula. Reading lists circulated on blogs and social media recognising the work of black and minority ethnic scholars, including those in the Global South, to reform the Eurocentric curriculum and challenge western ideas of knowledge creation.

In the UK, the exclusion of BME scholars institutionalises whiteness in disciplinary knowledge and creates disciplinary boundaries that further exclude the work of black academics. Acknowledging disparities in knowledge creation is a starting point for raising intellectual curiosity and awareness around gender stereotyping, racism and power imbalances in the academy.

But recognising and crediting scholarship should not be about making another’s work seem as though it matters. It should be about deeply engaging with the work, drawing lessons learnt and respectfully challenging positions of difference. The intention ought to be a moral and ethical recognition of scholarship as an equal intellectual project by all, for all.

As Jessa Crispin has argued, reading books by feminist authors does not necessarily erase sexism or make institutions gender equal, and the same goes for all imbalances of power. Without ‘reasoned agency’ by individuals and institutions, adding BME or Global South writers to reading lists will do little to change an academic system embedded in gendered, racialised and contextualised power traditions.

There is an urgent need to revisit research culture and the ways in which research is conducted, both at the individual and the institutional level. What would decolonising research culture require?

Ways of seeing

Our experiences of projects across Africa have shown that everyday research practices still implicitly reflect and internalise western knowledge traditions. Much of the research done in Africa is driven by a mindset imported from the Global North that often prejudges issues and research agendas without engaging with their context.

This leads to a deficit model of attempting to address a ‘problem’ that may not be a problem, rather than adopting an inclusive approach that draws on knowledge from fellow researchers or communities. As a result, researchers formulate, conduct and write about research in ways that often result in projects being much less beneficial to their ‘participants’ or ‘subjects’. Excluding the communities in which research is conducted reinforces colonial approaches to research.

To challenge unjust knowledge practices among and between researchers, the first step is to think about how unequal structures and relationships are perpetuated. How can we promote a culture that embraces different positions of knowledge and complement each other’s capabilities without overreliance on a single worldview?

We agree with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Achille Joseph Mbembe that challenging colonialist approaches to research in Africa is not about rejecting western ideas but about recentring Africa. It should also be about challenging research that overlooks indigenous, local or simply different ways of knowing.

For example, in our recent arts project with an indigenous community in Zimbabwe (pictured above), we found that although the participants enjoyed learning about and being exposed to new—western—art methods, they valued the use of traditional ways of storytelling such as folk tales.

Identifying these ways of knowing and thinking necessitates rethinking research methods so that all forms of knowledge can be identified and learned from. Many academics in the Global South draw on the work of the Global North, but there is much less evidence of northern academics following, reading and contributing to debates and knowledge created by colleagues in the south. Perhaps now is the time to promote equal epistemic opportunities.

Changing institutions

Institutional research practices also need to change. For instance, do institutions have co-authorship protocols that place all contributors on an equal footing?

There is a noxious but widespread culture of treating academics in the Global South as gatekeepers, getting their buy-in, using data they have collected and then not recognising their efforts and intellectual contributions. Research integrity requires crediting contributions and equitable intellectual property rights relating to knowledge and scholarship.

Decolonising academia needs a holistic approach to deconstructing power relationships—especially for research whose purpose is entangled in the agendas of many stakeholders, funders, administrators, institutions and researchers.

The time has come for researchers to start those uncomfortable conversations on how we can make research collaboration inclusive, respectful and equal. This should be a project for all—not, as too often happens, a responsibility placed upon BME staff, who are underrepresented and likely to be working in precarious circumstances.

It is time to challenge the historical status of the western epistemic tradition, its claims to offer a universal way of generating knowledge and the effects on researchers in the Global South. Decolonising research agendas will be complex, multilevel and multidimensional. It requires more than just building allegiance: it needs an awareness of the damage done by dominant, unquestioned attitudes and practices, and critical thought about what a just research system would look like.

Faith Mkwananzi is in the higher education and human development research group at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Melis Cin is a lecturer in education and social justice at Lancaster University.

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Expecting ‘The Science’ to settle controversial policy questions never ends well, says Angela Cassidy

A deeply felt, highly fraught debate about life, death and pathogens. Uncertainty, complexity and controversy over an infection that’s difficult to find, follow, understand or decide what to do about. Backstage policy tensions spilling into public spats between scientists, with politicians, activists and celebrities chipping in. 

Conspiracy theories. Fear and anger about who gets infected, who gets sick, who is protected and who dies. Regular invocations of ‘The Science’ to support contradictory, changing policies. Blame shifting. What a mess.  

All the above has been writ distressingly large as Britain, reluctantly and then in a flat panic, has faced the coronavirus pandemic. However, the same applies to the UK’s near 50-year history of debate over managing bovine tuberculosis, and whether it should be controlled by culling badgers. 

Having just written a book on the subject, I can’t help but see many parallels between the UK’s experiences with bovine TB and the coronavirus. But here I want to concentrate on a critical problem underlying many controversies that draw in science, policy and the public—the idea of The Big Book of Science. 

Misleading image

In media coverage, popular culture and political rhetoric, science is often ‘The Science’: a monolith of immutable, authoritative facts, discovered and written by heroic, lone geniuses. Some scientists are deeply invested in this image and work hard to build it, but many others don’t recognise or like it one bit. It’s also shown to be a vulnerable image when real people don’t live up to the myth.

Working scientists, and the researchers who study them, know that science in practice is a messy process of observation, investigation, theorising and constant, passionate argument. It involves interactions between research groups across multiple disciplines, all with different ways of working. 

What scientists know does settle into reliable knowledge—that’s why science is needed. But this is always under revision. The name of the game is to make sense of uncertainty. 

So what happens when science in practice becomes visible in public? This happens most obviously during public controversies and policy advisory processes, but preprint archives, open-science movements, social media and rolling news are all making science in practice increasingly visible. 

Confusion abounds

As we’ve seen in multiple cases, including cold fusion, mad cow disease, ‘climategate’ and now Covid-19, when The Big Book of Science and science in practice collide, confusion abounds.  

The history of bovine TB exposes long-term dysfunctions in relations between science, policy and the media in the UK. For example, politicians, policymakers and journalists reacted with anger and confusion when a randomised badger culling trial generated questions and uncertainties rather than providing the answers they wanted. 

Politicians and campaigners, for and against culling, strategically frame specific experts or evidence as ‘The Science’ to support their agendas. The most spectacular example saw two completely contradictory expert reports on the culling trial in the same year, but this still happens whenever new research papers on culling appear.  

In turn, some scientists have jostled for influence, inflated expectations about ‘The Science’ or naively assumed that their particular advice should automatically shape policy, irrespective of its plausibility or conflicts with other experts. Around bovine TB, these mismatches have created a repeating cycle of raised and broken expectations, which has corroded trust, perpetuated policy failure and driven polarisation of the controversy.   

So, how to move forwards? The slogan ‘Science is political’ doesn’t get us that far when ‘political’ covers everything from everyday office politics to open lobbying and partisan bias. 

Own the messiness

Science, medicine, business, journalism, policy and politics are all deeply interconnected and mutually shaped, yet they retain conflicting working practices, mindsets, norms and ultimate aims. Understanding these differences is crucial to finding more constructive modes of communication, policymaking and public debate.  

Rather than turning to The Big Book of Science, the aim should be close but mutually respectful science-policy relations, in which multiple options are considered and uncertainty stays in the room. 

In the UK’s response to Covid-19, that’s not what we’re getting. This has prompted widespread calls for transparency, but openness is only a first step towards accountability, not an end in itself. For transparency to work, scientists, journalists, politicians and the public must be willing to look at the messy, complex and scary world that science in practice reveals. 

It needs to be OK to talk about uncertainty without implying weakness, ignorance or unknowable mysteries. The Big Book of Science is a dangerous myth. Letting it go makes it easier to challenge policy incoherence, the politics of distraction, the strategic undermining of expertise and blame shifting.

Science in practice is a powerful tool: let’s use it. 

Angela Cassidy is a lecturer in science and technology studies at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Vermin, Victims and Disease: British debates over bovine tuberculosis and badgers (Palgrave, 2019).

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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The idea that government advisers can separate science and politics is bogus, says Melanie Smallman

This week, former UK government chief scientific advisor David King launched an “independent Sage” group to shadow the government’s official Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.

The move came after weeks of secrecy about the membership of Sage and speculation over whether the prime minister’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, had been present at, and influenced, these meetings.

But having worked for two departmental chief scientific advisors in the mid-2000s, I don’t think setting up a rival group claiming greater independence is the answer to questions around Sage’s remit, independence and transparency.

The CSAs I worked for regularly sat on Sage during the outbreaks of foot and mouth disease and (twice) bird flu. They—and their staff—were absolutely clear they were not employed as civil servants but as independent scientific advisers.

In case any of the ministers they advised ever forgot, they also had an ‘independent challenge function’ written into their job descriptions. Any hint of political interference was met with a threat to resign.

Of course, this isn’t a straightforward line to draw; one person’s interference can be another’s feedback. I remember a number of heated briefings where ministers were pushing one way and the CSA was pushing another.

But unless there has been a dramatic change in the terms and conditions under which CSAs are employed, then this dance should still be going on in government.

Inextricably mixed

More than that, however, having spent seven years in frontline science advice, I find the persistence of the idea that scientific advice can be separated from politics surprising.

I saw the problem with this idea first-hand, when a group of former colleagues set out to develop two-part submissions, separating scientific advice to ministers into one paper on the policy and another on the science. This, they reasoned, would allow the science to be shared for public scrutiny while keeping sensitive policy advice confidential.

The project was scrapped after several months of testing, because it was impossible to describe the science without revealing the policy advice. The questions being asked and the particular science being used were all shaped by the direction that policy was taking—and vice versa.

We have seen this in action so many times. In 1998, for example, the government appointed an independent scientific group to review the evidence on bovine tuberculosis. The group’s final report, published in 2007, recommended that testing and movement control, not culling badgers, were the best ways to control the disease.

But after this report, the government CSA—one David King—convened an alternative expert panel which thought differently. It recommended culling in high-incidence areas as the best way of reducing infection.

Loaded questions

As Angela Cassidy at the University of Exeter writes in her recent book, this difference of opinion owed nothing to the independence or the scientific purity of either group. It was entirely to do with different ways of valuing evidence—what she calls epistemic differences. The ISG kept a deliberately broad remit, but the review group looked only at the effect of badger culling, without considering practicalities or weighing it up against other options such as vaccination.

Similar epistemic differences are already evident in the independent Sage group, with members complaining about the dominance of modellers in official Sage, and the difficulties of getting public health expertise heard.

At a time of a global pandemic, bringing more—and more diverse—expertise to bear on the issue has to be welcome. But the danger is that, in pursuing some ideal of scientific independence, political issues get disguised as technical matters. This risks handing decisions to scientific experts rather than elected politicians, hiding both decisions and politicians from public scrutiny.

Scientists shouldn’t carry that can. There were a number of science-based options that politicians could have followed in this outbreak. If they chose the wrong ones, then we need to be clear that this was because of broken politics, not broken scientific advice.

Melanie Smallman is a lecturer in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London, and a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute 

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Expecting data to defeat Covid-19 is unrealistic and risky, says Saba Mirza

The cheerleaders for big data seem to believe that any problem is solvable with enough numbers. The coronavirus is just the latest example of such a problem.

Data is certainly flooding in—about how the virus has spread globally, how it has multiplied within populations, the most common symptoms in different age groups, the effects of local health policies, the global death count, and how some countries have used expertise in big data to control the virus. Forecasting models predict how the virus can spread, and the consequences in sickness, death and economic damage of different policy options.

Governments and societies have put their trust in numbers, in the data generated by each person, hospital, country, academic institution and forecasting guru. However much there is, more seems to be needed to help the sick, identify the vulnerable and quarantine the infected.

In the UK, the digital arm of the NHS, NHSX, is reportedly working to launch a contact-tracing app, of the kind already deployed in some Asian countries. This will notify people if they have spent time close to a person who has tested positive for the coronavirus.

Apple and Google too have launched a joint initiative, as providers of the two main mobile operating systems, to enable third-party apps to develop contact-tracing. The companies eventually plan to do away with third-party apps and directly collect data through their platforms to mitigate risks of data leaks.

Who’s watching?

During the lockdown, these measures may seem essential to resuming normal activity. But they come at a massive privacy cost to individuals.

Besides having access to people’s health data, these apps will also record their movements and interactions with others. Just as Facebook knows its users’ online connections, Apple, Google and the NHS will effectively know people’s networks in the physical world—our coworkers, neighbours, those we commute with, and so on.

The NHS is focused on health data, but Apple and Google have troves of all manner of data on their users. These data, when combined with health data and location-based tracking, will massively extend the reach of these tech giants into their customers’ private lives.

There is also no telling if this data collection will halt once Covid-19 is no longer a global threat, or if it will become routine. As the data will have both commercial and surveillance value, stopping collecting it could prove less straightforward than it might currently seem.

This is not to deny that data is an essential component of the research effort on coronavirus. The quickest route to drugs and vaccines, for example, lies through sharing the results of lab studies and clinical trials as widely as possible. How willing pharmaceutical companies will be to do this remains an open question.

But an over-reliance on data brings its own problems. Oxford University’s Big Data Institute has estimated that for a contact-tracing app to work, 60 per cent of the population needs to sign up and report accurate symptoms.

If the app remains voluntary, reaching this threshold will be difficult. But making the app mandatory raises huge issues around consent and privacy.

It is also difficult to estimate how much such an app will reduce the risk of contagion. The system will certainly not be foolproof.

It might flag people to isolate unnecessarily if, for example, they come within three metres of one another but remain in separate rooms. Or it might miss cases, as symptoms vary considerably among the infected, not to mention those who are asymptomatic.

Clutching at technology

Even if enough people sign up and the app helps to contain the spread of the virus, for the sick and vulnerable, key issues remain. There are persistent reports that frontline healthcare workers lack adequate personal protective equipment across NHS facilities in both Covid-19 wards and beyond. Intensive care units have struggled to find enough ventilators. Not enough people are getting tested.

An app will not solve these problems, nor many others.

And however good the data, it will only help government decision-making to a limited extent. Forecasts of the progress of the disease and the effect of measures to curb it will still be influenced by the models’ assumptions and oversights. Different models and datasets will still give different answers.

There will still be trade-offs between containing the disease, the immediate hardship caused by the lockdown—last week, the Food Foundation estimated that 3 million people in the UK had gone hungry at some point since it began—and long-term economic damage. Meanwhile, countries that had successfully contained the virus are seeing a resurgence.

Until a vaccine becomes available, the best government strategy will not be a straightforward question of ‘following the science’, or even of choosing one scientific model over another based on data generated by an app or otherwise.

It will be a complicated and difficult set of choices with underlying ethical values and principles. Clutching at technological solutions only shrouds these value judgments and shifts the focus away from problems that can be fixed, such as spending on public healthcare and providing welfare support to those in need.

Saba Mirza is a research assistant in the department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London

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Universities should not be given extra time just to polish their submissions, says Gemma Derrick

In the midst of tackling a pandemic, audit exercises should be the least of universities’ and researchers’ concerns.
So the decision to postpone the submission date for the 2021 Research Excellence Framework has been widely welcomed.

As things stand, the 27 November deadline for REF submissions has been scrapped, pending rescheduling. Higher education institutions are poised to pounce on the eight months preparation time they have been promised once the new deadline is announced. The census date of 31 July, when institutions submit information on staff with significant research responsibility, remains in place. 

While we wait for the clock to restart, there is much debate about which of the REF’s deadlines should be extended, the form the rescheduled exercise should take, and whether it should take place at all. 

These debates often overlook that the REF is not a single thing. It’s critical that the design of any extension considers how the productivity lost to Covid-19 will affect preparations for each of the exercise’s three components. It also needs to ensure that extra time is used to relieve the burden on staff preparing submissions, not for strategic game-playing by institutions.

Staff working on output, impact and environment submissions are not feeling the pressures equally. Any measures put in place by universities and the funding councils should reflect this. 

At this stage of REF preparation, delaying deadlines will have a minimal effect on the final submissions of research outputs. The case for extending both submission and census dates for impact case studies and environment statements is much stronger. 

Those preparing these will benefit more from having extra time to conduct the impact events and evidence gathering Covid-19 has interrupted. For impact, an extension to the submission date alone would mean little; an extension to the census date must also be considered.

Guard against gaming

For environment, how a unit of assessment responds to a crisis such as Covid-19 should surely be seen as a gauge of its vibrance and sustainability. This element would therefore also benefit from an extension to both submission and census dates, so that evaluators can assess institutions on their handling of the pandemic alongside traditional measures of esteem.  

An extension that treats each part of the REF separately may also guard against gaming. If universities simply leave their old internal deadlines in place and use the additional time for a never-ending cycle of internal discussion and polishing their submissions there is little need for an extension in the first place. 

There is no point in universities using an extension to marginally increase the probability of significant gains in the final outcome. They must not fall into the trap of believing that additional time and tinkering will allow them to transform a one-star submission into a four-star effort.

To make sure additional time is going to those who need it most, universities must make an honest assessment of how the pressures placed on different groups of staff balance with a realistic expectation of the organisation’s competitiveness within the exercise. They also need to comprehend how the current disruption might affect their expected REF outcome. 

That will mean institutions tempering their expectations about how this extra time could influence their final outcomes. Universities should be using the pause to reflect honestly on their expectations about their ambitions, their actual performance and their eventual outcomes. As with the effects on staff burdens, the potential gain in competitive advantage offered by the extended deadline will be larger for the impact and environment criteria than for outputs.

Universities are currently responding to Research England individually about how Covid-19 has interrupted their REF preparations. There is room here for realistic consideration of how the crisis has influenced each criterion separately, and to adjust both the census and submission deadlines accordingly. Altering deadlines appropriate to each criterion would maintain Research England’s aim to assess research within a defined period of time, without interfering with the integrity of the next REF period and exercise.

A delay in the REF, then, should not be used by universities to engage in strategic manoeuvring. And Covid-19 should not be a convenient excuse to cancel the REF altogether. What is needed is robust thinking and planning that takes into account each criterion, with the aim of relieving staff burdens, not feeding universities’ competitive urges.

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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Start thinking how to mitigate Covid-19’s impact on researchers’ productivity, says Kyungmee Lee

I lead an educational research group. Last week, two of my doctoral students contacted me to discuss their progress since Covid-19 measures had disrupted their data collection. 

One, whose study is self-funded, was particularly frustrated, and desperate to find a way forward. But with schools shut down, classes dismantled and social contacts prohibited, it seemed impossible for her to collect data. She decided to take a leave of absence to stop her academic clock. 

The other student, who is funded by his government, did not have this option, as his funder would not allow any leave of absence. I suggested he conduct interviews online, but we both knew this would yield far inferior data compared with the in-person interviews with teachers in their classrooms that he had planned. Obviously, he was very disappointed. 

The precise effects of the Covid-19 pandemic will depend on each researcher’s circumstances. But, like my students, most will be experiencing sudden interruptions to their research, reduced productivity, and distress over their personal and professional circumstances. 

The difficulties created by the outbreak for researchers and their work will be immediate and long term. They will affect every aspect of academic life, and all of researchers’ diverse identities and roles. Identifying and understanding them is the first step towards mitigating them. 

Moving online

Most urgently, following the suspension of face-to-face classes academics are moving their classes and teaching online. This shift is having direct and indirect impacts. 

In normal circumstances, developing an online course involves a team of academics, designers, librarians and technicians. Following a careful analysis of students’ learning needs and prior knowledge, a range of instructional methods and strategies are reviewed to find the optimal approach to teaching particular content to the target students. 

The resulting package, typically including elements such as lecture videos, quizzes, assignments and group com-munications, is reviewed using institutional, national and global metrics and regulations. Once the course is uploaded and delivered online, a team of tutors and online learning support staff monitor and facilitate students’ learning. 

At the moment, however, many academics with no previous experience of online teaching are working mostly alone to put their courses online. This is necessarily rushed and unsystematic, and the quality of online teaching suffers as a result. 

Being the frontline contact who receives frustrated students’ queries and feedback can be more work than online teaching itself, while the sudden loss of face-to-face contact with students and lack of feedback can be disconcerting. After putting lectures and resources online, many academics are unsure if students are learning anything meaningful from their course, but checking students’ learning and providing further support can be arduous.

Juggling commitments 

Many academics are also parents. Those at an early stage of their career are the most likely to be juggling teaching and working from home with figuring out how to homeschool their kids. There are online resources to be explored and contacts with school to be managed. Prioritising the needs of their children and students will increase overload and fatigue, reduce productivity and push research projects back. 

There is also a rapid increase in email traffic. Organisations and committees are making urgent contingency plans. Decisions on what to cancel, what to postpone and what to do remotely and how require many conversations. 

Having to do all this from home makes decision-making less efficient. Added to this is a stream of emails asking researchers to step into this or that role should their colleagues fall ill.

Tenured academics are at least lucky that Covid-19 may not dent their income or job prospects. For many non-tenured researchers, a period of relative inactivity has more serious implications for their future career. For those on casual contracts, including many doctoral students, the suspension of research activities may have a more immediate financial impact. 

Given everything else going on, it might be unrealistic to expect immediate support for researchers to be made available, but we need to understand the challenges they face. 

As a community, we need to support each other by acknowledging the issues we are dealing with and the importance of having realistic expectations for ourselves and others. When the outbreak ends, we can work out how to repair any damage to research, and minimise the long-term damage to careers.  

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight and a version also appeared in Research Europe

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