To tackle deep-seated problems, party must resist both techno-hype and received wisdom, says Kieron Flanagan

It seems increasingly likely that Keir Starmer will enter Downing Street on 5 July as the leader of a Labour government with a sizeable majority. The party is sticking to its ‘Ming vase’ strategy of getting over the line without any missteps—but this doesn’t explain the lack of new detail on research and innovation policy in the Labour manifesto, launched in Manchester last week.

I count four mentions of ‘science’, and those are references to the UK’s life sciences and data science sectors. ‘Research’ gets two mentions, one in connection with a promise to better join up investments in artificial intelligence research, the other a reference to the UK’s excellent research institutions.

The most specific statement relates to the pre-manifesto commitment to 10-year budgets for government R&D spending. But given that no parliament can bind its successor, this would require handing over multi-year tranches of funds in advance.

This would entail huge changes in government spending and accounting practices. Realistically, we’re probably looking at a statement of intent, more like the last Labour government’s science and innovation investment framework for 2004-14.

One new thing in the manifesto is explicit recognition of the financial crisis in the university system. Unfortunately, there’s no hint at what Labour might do to deal with this profound challenge.

A significant rise in English tuition fees seems inconceivable; nor can I see substantial new funding for teaching and research. A Labour government might commission a review of funding to consider the long-term issues, but in the short term everything points to a continued reliance on international students to plug the gap and the prospect of bail-outs or enforced mergers of individual universities.

Innovation incoherence

What about innovation? I count 15 mentions. This, too, is in keeping with past manifestos—everyone wants more innovation.

There are general promises to encourage innovation in the NHS, in defence, in financial services, in infrastructure and transport, and in regulation. There are the already announced promises of a new industrial strategy and national wealth fund. There are statements about the vitality and importance of our creative industries.

Isolated commitments around gigafactories and data centres make for future-facing soundbites, but not a coherent strategy. And there are several mentions of harnessing public procurement to drive innovation, something governments of all flavours have sought to achieve for two decades, but which does have potential if better joined up with industrial strategies and other policies.

Indeed, in power, there are a lot of small things Labour might do to improve strategy and co-ordination around industrial and technology policy without major spending increases. And the party’s core message seems to be: growth first, investment later.

In denial?

But is Labour in denial about the scale of the structural weaknesses that stunt productivity and drive inequality in the UK? The long-term assumptions behind science and technology policy—of managing decline relative to the rest of the world and of the power of university research commercialisation—are deeply ingrained. There are also powerful forces in the system with an interest in lobbying against change.

This does not make change impossible. There’s the counter-example of the 1964 creation of the Ministry of Technology by Harold Wilson’s incoming government to shift technological priorities away from defence while upgrading industry. MinTech, based in part on the powerful wartime Ministry of Supply, could mobilise significant public spending on new technologies. However, it soon fell out of favour.

Finding ways to create, shape and scale-up early markets for advanced technologies is essential if public R&D investment is not to be a luxury that mainly benefits foreign actors. This could be addressed partly by linking R&D policy to industrial strategy and plans for devolution and local growth. The risk is that a Labour government instead continues the present government’s naive obsession with AI and digital technologies.

UK policy wonks of all stripes read the same blogs and pay too much attention to the same big-name commentators. It’s too easy to mistake hype for prophecy. This hype reinforces the obsession with commercialising basic research, rather than a genuinely broader-based technology policy that puts R&D at the heart of industrial upgrading and market creation.

There’s a strong unmet need in the UK to learn from earlier waves of technological development, and from the policy responses towards them. It’s hard enough to do this in opposition; to do it in government will be almost impossible.

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

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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While universities resist broader submissions, grassroots campaign will continue, say Gemma Derrick and Simon Hettrick

The 2029 Research Excellence Framework must be the first in which a group of researchers actively want to be assessed. The new rules promise to open up the exercise to under-recognised members of the research workforce, such as technicians, who are crying out to be included in their institutions’ REF submissions.

This contrasts with a widespread culture of resistance against inclusion. Arguments for abolishing the REF centre on how it distorts research—backed by studies suggesting that national research evaluations limit academics’ choices and freedom—and loads unnecessary workload and emotional burden on university administrators.

Universities, however, have responded coolly to this outbreak of REF enthusiasm. Non-traditional outputs and roles are still not deemed sufficiently competitive to risk submitting in place of the more traditional outputs of books and journal articles.

Universities’ conservatism is understandable. Faced with financial pressures around income from domestic student fees and debate surrounding international students, they are retreating into old notions of competitiveness. 

Developing new approaches to evaluation and the kind of research culture that the next REF seeks to promote is seen as a luxury. But immediate challenges should not diminish the larger responsibility to improve research outcomes by recognising and appreciating all parts of the research community.

Celebrating all outputs

The Hidden REF is a competition that started in 2021 as a way to celebrate those aspects of research that could be included in submissions but seldom were, as well as to trial more effective ways to evaluate them. It was never about changing the mainstream REF; it was about surfacing unrepresented aspects of research culture and showing how evaluation choices by universities dictated what was visible and invisible.  

For us, a better, more inclusive research community was only possible if the research being conducted and the way that it was disseminated was fully acknowledged, valued and put forward for evaluation.

When the initial decisions on the next REF were published in July 2023, we hoped our job was done. The full range of permissible outputs, from data to musical compositions, was promoted, and the rules changed to allow different types of contributors. 

Above all, the renamed people, culture and environment criterion and its increased weighting, up to 25 per cent of the total from the 15 per cent allocated to research environment in 2021, seemed the ideal vehicle for universities to adopt the Hidden REF’s messages.

The 5% Manifesto 

We knew, however, that institutions would not reshape their REF submissions simply out of the goodness of their hearts. They also needed a carrot. So last autumn we launched our 5% Manifesto, calling on universities to pledge to give at least this proportion of their REF submissions over to non-traditional research outputs. 

As well as formalising this commitment, the manifesto aims to build momentum behind such a change. The Hidden REF Festival, held in Bristol in September, revealed a strong appetite for this.

This is what an overlooked and discontented research community wants from an assessment exercise that evaluates them under the guise of ‘research quality’. Universities’ response to the advocacy of Hidden REF committee members, however, has been less enthusiastic. These discussions have shown us that the Hidden REF competition is needed now more than ever.

The 5% Manifesto is not a tax on submissions or a restriction of institutional autonomy. It’s an incentive to create a broader vision of the REF’s possibilities, and perhaps something to include in a people, culture and environment submission.  

Our intention is to give voice to people and outputs deemed ‘uncompetitive’ by universities whose view is restricted by notions of excellence that still owe too much to the culture of past REFs.

Culture change within inherently conservative institutions, even when it would be to their benefit, takes time and gentle nudging. Our job as a grassroots movement is not done. 

The 2024 competition is now open, with added categories such as team science, citizen science and campaigns. We will remain a grassroots organisation, representing those whose contributions get overlooked by their universities. 

We are committed to building universities’ confidence that non-traditional outputs and research roles are competitive. If universities do more to support the people and contributions that are vital to research, they will become more successful at research. 

Gemma Derrick is an associate professor in research policy and culture at the University of Bristol. Simon Hettrick is a professor of research software engineering at the University of Southampton. They are both committee members for the Hidden REF.

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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Time to restore the social sciences to their rightful place, says James Wilsdon

When you move to Sheffield, as I did eight years ago, one of the first things you discover is the culinary and cultural power of the local secret sauce: Henderson’s Relish. As the saying goes up here: “Some people call it Sheffield’s answer to Worcestershire Sauce—that’s not true. Hendo’s is Sheffield’s answer to everything.”

These days, Hendo’s even comes in red and white or blue and white bottles to cater for the tribal tastes of Sheffield United or Sheffield Wednesday fans. I wouldn’t pour it on my cornflakes, but if you’re cooking something more exciting, there are few dishes that don’t benefit from a good splash. It adds depth, complexity and richness, complementing and drawing out other ingredients and flavours.

In a report published today by the Academy of Social Sciences and Sage, we argue that the social sciences perform a similar function in the UK’s research and innovation system. Drawing on new data from Digital Science, we highlight four ways in which the social sciences act as a ‘secret sauce’ in wider recipes for R&D.

First, the social sciences enable whole systems thinking. They help innovators, entrepreneurs and decision-makers to understand broader system capabilities and dynamics—including how economies and institutions function, and the place of productivity, skills, training and organisational culture.

Second, the social sciences are vital for good policy development. Our data show that social scientists play a disproportionately large role in informing policy debates, here in the UK and internationally. Around 3 per cent of publications supported by Stem-related research grants in the UK end up being cited in policy documents. This rises to 6 per cent of publications supported by social science-related grants and 7.5 per cent of publications from grants that can be characterised as interdisciplinary, often with Stem and social science collaborators.

Third, the social sciences underpin smart and responsible innovation. New and emerging technologies depend upon social sciences for the legal, regulatory and ethical frameworks that are essential for them to advance in ways that maximise their opportunities, safeguard against risks, and protect the vulnerable. Across published research in specific fields such as the ethics of AI and autonomous systems, analysis by Digital Science shows that UK social science research gains on average 240 per cent more citations than the global norm.

Finally, the social sciences are essential to international collaboration and capacity to address shared challenges, including the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The UK’s international research and innovation strategy is underpinned by insights and expertise from the social sciences—including from business and management, politics, geography, area studies and international development.

Creative blend

At some level, the government recognises that the UK research system relies upon—and often creatively blends—expertise, evidence and skills from across Stem fields, the arts, humanities and social sciences. But in the past five years, we’ve heard a great deal from ministers about the transformative power of science and new technologies, and a lot less about the contribution of the rest of the system to meeting national priorities.

There has been a palpable narrowing of focus, and a turn away from the more holistic systems-thinking that values such connections and interdependencies, and was increasingly central to policy from 2000 onwards, across Labour, Conservative and coalition governments. More recently, this has been exacerbated by a culture war mindset, which makes some in the present government hostile to the social sciences, irrespective of their contribution.

Two of the most significant policy documents in this area of the last Parliament—the 2021 Integrated Review and the Science & Technology Framework, published by the newly created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in March 2023—contain a combined total of 175 substantive references to “science” or “S&T”, 211 references to “technology”, and another 93 to specific technologies (including AI). By contrast, the social sciences chalk up only one solitary mention, and the arts and humanities manage two.

This needs to change. When he took office as US president in 2009, one of Barack Obama’s early pledges in a well-received speech to the National Academy of Sciences was “to restore science to its rightful place”, after a period in which it had been undervalued and undermined by his predecessor.

In the UK, as we look ahead to the next election and the likelihood of a Labour government, it’s time to restore the social sciences to their rightful place in the way we structure, plan and invest for a high-performing, transdisciplinary research and innovation system, capable of meeting the acute challenges we face.

James Wilsdon is professor of research policy and director of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) at UCL. Reimagining the Recipe for Research & Innovation: the secret sauce of social science is available to download free from the Academy of Social Sciences website.

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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Don’t let automation threaten broad scientific training, say Kieron Flanagan, Barbara Ribeiro and Priscilla Ferri

This has been the year of generative artificial intelligence. Tools such as ChatGPT have intensified interest in, and raised expectations about, the impacts of AI in all walks of life.

Governments have increasingly stepped up efforts to regulate AI, becoming more aware than ever of the need to better understand the technology’s implications and challenges. Such is the background of the AI Safety Summit being organised by the UK government this week.

The world of research has not been immune from this frenzy of interest; even before ChatGPT became famous, there was increasing attention on the prospects for AI and robotics to transform the practices, and the productivity, of the scientific enterprise through, for instance, the adoption of machine learning or advanced liquid-handling robots.

Unfortunately, touting the adoption of AI and robotics as the solution to supposed problems with scientific productivity reduces the scientific enterprise to an input-output process. This focus on knowledge output obscures broader implications for the public value of science. Our chapter in a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development book, Artificial Intelligence in Science, looks at these broader issues for policy and society raised by the effects of AI on the scientific workforce.

The human factor

One of the prime concerns driving the emergence of science policy in the 20th century was to ensure a supply of scientists and engineers equal to the needs of the economy and society. The term ‘science base’ captures this focus on the human capacity to do research.

The science base is where new scientists and engineers, not simply new knowledge, are produced. The effort to produce Covid-19 vaccines exemplified the value of a strong science base, as it required mobilising teams, networks and human capabilities, not simply building on existing knowledge.

The public value of science depends on maintaining and developing this human, organisational and infrastructural research capacity. It underpins society’s ability to carry out problem-driven research and, through the supply of scientists and engineers, also fosters entrepreneurship and industrial innovation.

Learning by doing

People typically become researchers by doing research, learning on the job as PhDs and postdocs, gaining not only skills but also the culture and assumptions of their community. When the way in which research is done changes, so do these training and development opportunities.

Historically, technology has replaced routine labour-intensive aspects of research with automated tools. But new tools also introduce new routines and mundane tasks.

Whether what’s being automated is statistical inference or pipetting, new forms of mundane work, such as cleaning data or supervising laboratory robots, will be created. Who will perform these tasks, and how will such duties affect the broad shape of their work?

Changes to scientific work will alter the quantity and quality of the training and development opportunities in the science base. If automation means that fewer early career researchers are required, or if their roles become primarily focused on work with automated systems, scientific training and development could become more narrow.

There is also a risk that important understanding and skills may be lost. For example, some commentators have argued that the widespread misuse of statistical tests in published research stems partly from the ‘black-boxing’ of statistical analysis in standardised software packages.

Team building

We cannot understand how AI might change science without considering the human and social nature of scientific practice. New ensembles of AI and other automation technologies will reconfigure the science base, changing how scientists work together and coordinate everyday tasks. This will create both new demands for funding and unpredictable consequences for the goals of science policy.

Some commentators confidently predict that new combinations of collective and machine intelligence are set to take over the larger social processes through which a scientific community sets its research agenda, sifts competing claims and agrees which are valid. Others point out that current approaches to AI contribute little to these processes.

AI is already shaping researchers’ skill sets and routines. Funders and scientists alike need to recognise that the science base that results from the adoption of AI and new forms of automation may create new demands for public funding; at the same time, it may undermine the case for public funding by reducing the public value contained within the science base. 

Kieron Flanagan, Barbara Ribeiro and Priscila Ferri are in the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, University of Manchester

A version of this article also appeared in Research Europe

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Universities shouldn’t have to ask what a good research culture looks like, says Gemma Derrick

The UK university sector is exhausted. We are suffering a hangover from Covid-19 and industrial action. There is a rising murmur that researchers and their institutions are bruised and now is not the time for change.

On top of this come the rule changes proposed for the 2028 Research Excellence Framework—in particular, the plan to make assessment of people, culture and environment worth 25 per cent of the total. This would replace the environment statement that was worth 15 per cent in previous exercises.

Faced with such a high-stakes change, worries and quibbles are understandable. Some universities have pointed to uncertainties about how research culture can be defined and assessed, and expressed doubts that it can be. Some are lobbying to return to the definitions and weightings used in previous REFs.

But the reception for REF 2028 also shows precisely why the change is needed. Calls to maintain the status quo highlight universities’ inability to see past their desire to compete with one another and think instead about what is best for their own research communities.

Missing the point

Calling for precise definitions of research culture is like asking for a target. It risks negating the purpose of the criterion altogether, and in the process overlooking the issues that will be specific to each institution.

Plainly put, if an institution needs to be told what a good research culture looks like, it is missing the point. The answer lies within.

Movements such as the Hidden REF—the campaign to recognise the contributions and roles in research that traditional evaluation overlooks—show that research culture must be defined from the bottom up, by the people who create it through their day-to-day choices, behaviours and interactions. The REF 2028 rules simply give institutions an incentive to do what they should be doing every day: fostering research and researchers.

Rather than asking UK Research and Innovation to set standardised targets or metrics, universities should see the years leading up to the next REF as an opportunity to understand and improve their own research culture, building on their successes, and identifying and addressing their failings.

Excellent opportunity

To reach this essential goal, there must also be sacrifices. Reducing the assessment’s weighting for outputs, from 60 per cent to 50 per cent, is one.

Some have assumed that this represents a reduction in support for ‘excellent’ research. But research excellence has never been isolated to the outputs criterion alone. It is reflected across all criteria, and who is to say that producing ‘excellent’ outputs is more important than creating excellent working environments?

Excellent working environments enable excellent research. Increasing the REF’s attention on people and culture gives universities the perfect opportunity and incentive to think about what such environments look like and how they can be built.

The research culture in universities is not healthy: the workforce is overstretched and exhausted; the disruptions of the pandemic are still felt; early career researchers survive on precarious contracts while hoping to grab an ever-decreasing chance of job stability; there are outrageous gender, ethnicity and disability pay gaps; and anonymous review processes and top-down, unaccountable management structures still enable too much bad behaviour.

Many people in UK universities would scoff at the suggestion that a research world with the REF is better than one without it. But it is worth remembering that the exercise, for better or for worse, is a tool to help the research community create the type of world it wants.

At an institutional level, good research culture thrives on a diversity of voices, perspectives and methods. At a national level, it is not in the best interests of UK research to have many institutions all looking the same.

Carrot and stick

Evaluation frameworks, such as the Research Excellence Framework, are always a balance between carrot and stick.

The people, culture and environment element of REF 2028 should be a carrot that can entice universities, which generally resist change, towards building a research culture that is healthier, more genuinely productive and more resilient, because it is open to the diversity and variety of people and ideas that make research a great career.

This is what is at stake. Doing the REF right might seem exhausting or too difficult. But making evaluation a stick, making culture another useless target to audit and measure, or falling into an apathy-induced maintenance of the status quo, will be more damaging.

Gemma Derrick is an associate professor in research policy and culture in the School of Education, University of Bristol, and a committee member of the Hidden REF

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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Moves against emphasis on culture are mistaken, say Stephen Curry, Elizabeth Gadd and James Wilsdon

When the proposals for the next Research Excellence Framework were published in June, reactions were broadly positive.

In the past five years, the acute problems in research cultures have received steadily more attention from university leaders, policymakers and funders. REF 2028’s increased attention to people, culture and environment offered a route to tackling these concerns, rebalancing incentives towards the collective and collaborative aspects of a healthy, dynamic and fair research system.

Yet as summer edged into autumn, in some quarters that confidence seems to have collapsed. Critics are circling the REF 2028 proposals, hoping to dilute or scrap them altogether, in favour of the status quo.

This would be a mistake, subverting efforts to improve UK research culture through the uniquely influential mechanism of the REF and effectively kicking the can to the framework after next in 2035.

Three-pronged attack

Arguments against the proposed reforms fall into three camps. Some protest that reducing the weighting towards research outputs from 60 per cent to 50 per cent of the exercise risks compromising its focus on the ‘excellence’ of UK research. This view hinges on the contention that research culture is an input, or enabler, not an output, so should not be factored into assessment.

A second line of attack is that the reforms sound nice in principle, but are technically complicated or unworkable: how do you define research culture, never mind measure it?

The final camp is trying to drag the REF into the culture wars, portraying any attempt to fold people and culture into assessment as part of the creep of ‘wokeism’ or a threat to academic freedom.

Each critique raises important issues that need open, honest and evidence-informed discussion. To instead hope that surreptitious lobbying or scaremongering will throttle the proposals before new methods can be elaborated and the wider research community consulted runs counter to the spirit of the process.

Swimming with the tide

In December 2022, our Harnessing the Metric Tide review set out the rationale for these reforms. In June, the Future Research Assessment Programme’s heavyweight International Advisory Group did the same, in fact recommending that REF 2028 give equal weighting to outputs, impacts, and environment and culture—a significantly more radical model than the one adopted.

Such findings draw on more than a decade of international dialogue, which has identified the many harmful unintended effects–such as hyper-competition, loss of creativity and research integrity, inefficiency, short-termism and bias—that result from evaluation processes too focused on published scholarly outputs.

Initiatives such as the Declaration on Research Assessment, Latin American Forum in Scientific Evaluation and Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment, to name a few, agree that definitions and indicators of excellence should embrace not only outputs, but also the processes, environment and outcomes of research.

Over the past five years, UK funders and institutions have steadily aligned with this international consensus. UK Research and Innovation has endorsed the government’s R&D People and Culture Strategy, while in its 2021 report, Realising our Potential, the Russell Group calls a healthy research culture “crucial to attracting and retaining staff, ensuring a research-led recovery and building the UK’s reputation as a global leader in research”.

Deja vu

This makes it disappointing that, given an opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, some have opted for a hasty retreat. Such back-pedalling reflects both a tightening in the wider funding climate and the realpolitik of research assessment, which has still not internalised critiques of a narrow view of excellence.

One puzzling aspect of the pushback is that people and culture already figure prominently in the REF’s assessment of research environments, which made up 15 per cent of the 2021 exercise.

The latest proposals represent an evolution, not a revolution, giving greater emphasis to the accepted view that without a culture that lets people thrive, there can be very little excellent research. Adjusting the weightings is a logical step—and one taken before with the introduction of impact in REF 2014.

Then, as now, many argued loudly that the move would be damaging, daft or technically impossible. But the government and funding councils held firm, and 10 years on, the inclusion of impacts is regarded as one of the REF’s better features.

Any new element of research assessment may bring unforeseen consequences. But like research cultures, impacts take many forms, showing that the REF can handle concepts that are hard to define. And, as happened with impact, changes to the assessment of research culture would surely be consulted on and piloted.

Proceed with care

All sides can agree that we need to proceed with care—codifying research cultures raises genuinely tricky questions. However, the means by which the REF plans to achieve this—using the Scope framework, which encourages evaluators to look for unintended consequences and gauge costs and benefits; co-creating the evaluation with those who will be evaluated; and combining qualitative and quantitative approaches—are established principles of responsible research assessment.

Safeguarding the vitality, qualities and impacts of UK research means getting this right. Abandoning these proposals now, or putting them off to 2035, would suggest that all the commitments to improving research cultures by ministers, funders, vice-chancellors and researchers themselves are just so much lip-service.

It is time for our world-leading research institutions to demonstrate genuine leadership in how we measure, manage and evaluate the things that matter most in research.

Stephen Curry is a consul and professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, chair of the Declaration on Research Assessment, and director of strategy at the Research on Research Institute.

Elizabeth Gadd is research culture and quality lead at Loughborough University, chair of the research evaluation group of the International Network of Research Management Societies, and a vice-chair of the Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment.

James Wilsdon is professor of research policy in the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy at University College London, and executive director of the Research on Research Institute.

A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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Party’s conference mirrors Harold Wilson’s defining moment at 1963 gathering, says Melanie Smallman

From Sunday, the Labour Party meets in Liverpool for its annual conference. Almost 60 years to the day since Harold Wilson delivered his famous “white heat of technology” speech, many are asking whether current leader Keir Starmer will match the ambition of that era.

Speaking at Labour’s 1963 conference in Scarborough, Wilson described his vision to create a different kind of Britain by harnessing the scientific and technological revolution that was taking place in electronics, computing and biology.

Many have pointed to this speech—and the sense of change that it embodied—as being key to Labour’s success in the 1964 general election, which evicted the Conservatives and made Wilson prime minister.

There are strong parallels today. This year’s conference season could be the last before a general election. And, in the grip of the growing climate emergency and cost of living crisis, Britain seems a country ripe for retooling for the future.

In some ways, Labour’s course on technology and innovation is set. Last year’s conference unveiled the party’s Green Prosperity Plan to make Britain a superpower in clean, cheap energy through unprecedented levels of investment in technologies, skills and industries.

So what of this year and beyond? Prime minister Rishi Sunak’s efforts to make issues such as pollution controls and net zero a dividing line in a culture war have given the opposition an open goal: in a recent poll carried out by Survation for Greenpeace, 71 per cent of voters in marginal seats said that environmental policies would sway their vote.

More importantly, Starmer understands the importance of innovation in addressing the key issues facing the country: growing the economy, tackling twin cost of living and climate crises, and winning the global race to the top.

My prediction for this year’s conference is that Labour will double down on its commitment to clean energy and low-carbon innovation, as part of a package to tackle the cost of living crisis.

Sending signals

For the UK’s science and technology sector, this is about more than the specific policies. The signals sent to industry will influence whether vast sums of private sector funding are invested in the UK or elsewhere.

Beyond the low-carbon transition, I expect the party to also focus on artificial intelligence (AI), both in its promise to transform public services and deliver more for less, and in the challenges of its regulation and governance. This is a tricky tightrope for Labour to walk.

On the one hand, Silicon Valley techno-optimism offers a positive and transformative story about the future. It would be a foolish chancellor who did not want a stake in this huge and growing industry. On the other hand, trade unions are increasingly concerned about the impact of automation on their members’ jobs; the Treasury struggles to collect revenues from digital companies; and the role of these technologies in widening inequality is becoming clearer.

As algorithms begin to shape decisions in all walks of life, and particularly the public services, issues with AI will come up more on the doorstep and in MPs’ inboxes. At the same time, the UK risks getting caught between the EU’s desire for strong regulation on AI, and the US and China’s desire to drive their industries forward.

Finally, the focus on green growth and AI must not overshadow a vital area of UK science. Once the jewel in our crown, the life sciences saw a steep drop in 2022, the life sciences saw a steep drop in the estimated value of inward foreign direct investment, according to a government report published in July. R&D spending by medical charities has also yet to recover to its pre-pandemic level in real terms.

Successive governments have never quite managed to convert the UK’s strength in life sciences into savings for the NHS. But coupling advances in genetics and genomics with AI and computational power has the potential to be transformative, reaching beyond healthcare to how we approach issues such as the impact of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Back to the forefront

After the conference season, Labour will need to think carefully about how to reboot the life sciences sector—not necessarily just with more public funding, but by partnering and developing joint-investment vehicles, and through opportunities to harness NHS data for public value.

Regaining our leading edge in life sciences would place a Labour government truly at the forefront of global innovation in all sectors, positioning the country to maximise the benefits of technologies that promise to be white hot, now and in the decades ahead.

Melanie Smallman is associate professor in science and technology studies at University College London and a member of Labour’s National Policy Forum and its green and digital future commission. She will be speaking at a 12 October event at UCL marking the 60th anniversary of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ speech.

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The assessment’s architects face many questions on what to value and how, says Grace Gottlieb

Research culture covers a vast breadth of areas, from career pathways and incentives to research integrity and equality. Most of these aren’t easily measurable—and even if they were, there’s a limit to universities’ capacity to measure them all.

So while the increased emphasis on culture in the 2028 Research Excellence Framework has been broadly welcomed, the question of how it will be assessed has also created apprehension. How will the funding bodies decide what areas of the research system are worth measuring and what the best metrics are? 

All involved in the REF recognise the work needed to develop indicators of research culture. The sector has an opportunity to inform these decisions; the funding bodies are interested in learning from institutions, particularly those developing their own key performance indicators to measure culture change.

Performance vs progress

Aside from deciding what aspects of culture to measure, there’s another question about values to answer: when measuring research culture, is performance or progress more important? 

The answer depends on where you set the balance between seeing the REF as a mechanism to reward performance and seeing it as a way to incentivise behaviour change. Steven Hill, director of research at Research England, has indicated that culture change, and the direction of change, is probably more important than absolute performance, or at least needs to be considered alongside it.

This raises more questions, around how to quantify progress, on top of those around how to quantify performance. How this balance is struck could have a real impact on different institutions’ success on research culture metrics. 

A focus on progress would arguably do more to accelerate culture change. But could focusing on change and its direction disadvantage institutions with histories of investing in research culture, or perhaps make it more difficult to distinguish between institutions? There is already uncertainty around how institutions can set themselves apart from the pack in the People, Culture and Environment element of the REF.

Given all this, a comprehensive process is needed to select the right indicators to measure culture. Ideally, this would be iterative, enabling us to try different options and figure out what works over time. 

But is there time for this? While the funding bodies’ consultation this coming autumn will be hugely important, there will be a limit to the testing that can be done before REF 2028. The availability of data and practicality of different metrics will also be factors.

Inputs and outputs

The changes to the REF to assess research culture have also stirred controversy because they shift to rewarding inputs to the research system rather than focusing on outputs and outcomes. On the other hand, well-trained researchers are an important output of the research ecosystem, and one could also see culture as an outcome of research assessment practices.

There seems to be a distinction developing here between the outputs and outcomes of research and those of the research system. In the context of the latter, broader conception, it’s possible to see research culture as both an input and an outcome. 

A comprehensive view would consider policies alongside recognition and reward systems and the practices they seek to promote, including collegiality, mobility to and from other sectors, research integrity and openness.

Culture touches even on the narrower definition of the outputs of research itself. Broadening the notion of research outputs has been a longstanding challenge. The proportion of outputs not related to publications or books fell from 6 per cent in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise to 2.4 per cent in REF 2021. 

This has prompted the Hidden REF campaign to drive academia to recognise and value the full diversity of research outputs. It recently launched a 5% Manifesto, calling on institutions to ensure that at least 5 per cent of the outputs they submit to REF 2028 are in non-traditional formats.

As the REF broadens its view of the research system, this raises yet more questions. How should the value of, say, a highly cited paper in basic research compare with a piece of software that underpins a range of subsequent research, or the training of a PhD student who goes on to work in industry?

The more the funding bodies seek to make assessment reflect the variety of research endeavours, the more decisions they must make on how to measure and weight their value. Given the REF’s huge influence, these decisions will shape the behaviour of institutions, researchers and the whole ecosystem. Time will tell whether REF 2028 lives up to the big ambitions behind it. 

Grace Gottlieb is head of research policy at University College London. This article is based on the event The Emerging Shape of REF 2028, organised by the Foundation for Science and Technology, UCL and the Research on Research Institute, in association with Research England

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

The post REF 2028: How do you measure culture? appeared first on Research Professional News.

Summit and new UKRI programme can drive a democratic approach to regulation, says Jack Stilgoe

In 1975, some of the world’s leading scientists met to discuss what was then an exciting and troubling new technology, recombinant DNA—essentially the first genetic engineering. Spooked by talk of rogue superbugs and threats of regulation from United States policymakers, scientists had declared a moratorium on research in 1974 (sound familiar?).

The 1975 meeting at Asilomar, California, that agreed a set of guidelines under which the work could continue has been talked about as a milestone in responsible innovation. Crucially, however, the meeting’s agenda was set by the researchers and innovators who would be governed by the principles it produced.

That year, US senator Ted Kennedy called the scientists’ attempts to take responsibility “commendable, but…inadequate”, adding that “the factors under consideration extend far beyond their technical competence. In fact they were making public policy. And they were making it in private.” Others saw it as more of an attempt to head off regulation than to impose it.

The Asilomar model has been copied many times, including with an Asilomar for artificial intelligence in 2017. That meeting was more inclusive than its biological predecessor, but repeated some of the same mistakes, producing a set of weak and speculative principles.

Since this meeting, excitement over AI has exploded, especially in the past six months. But the sorts of ethical principles agreed in 2017 have done little to shape the technology in more ethical ways.

Brokering regulation

Forward to 2023, and Rishi Sunak rightly calculates that while the UK will never win a tech arms race, it could usefully lead a debate about responsible innovation, standards and regulation. Accordingly, the prime minister used his recent trip to the White House to announce an AI Summit to take place later this year.

This would be a forum not just for scientific exchange, but also for international diplomacy and technology assessment to help ensure that there is a global effort to raise regulatory standards rather than a race to the bottom. For a nation looking for a new global role post-Brexit, potentially as a bridge between European dirigisme and Silicon Valley’s Wild West, AI could be a vital test case.

Until now, the debate about responsible AI and AI ‘safety’ has been led by the powerful (mainly)men who are developing the technology. Geoffrey Hinton, the AI pioneer whose fears prompted his resignation from Google, Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and others did not have to speak out with their concerns about AI. They have—as scientists have throughout history—rung important alarm bells. But alarm bells do not tell us what to do next.

We urgently need to hear more from the people likely to use AI and the people whose lives and livelihoods are likely to be disrupted. It is notable that, when Silicon Valley types talk about democratisation, they tend to mean something like ‘make it cheap and easy’, rather than ‘let the people decide’.

We now need some real democracy. Rather than fixating on utopian dreams or existential risks, we must understand what people really care about, otherwise governments risk governing an imaginary technology rather than a real one.

Social scientists and computer scientists have tried over the past few years to draw policymakers’ attention to the real harms that AI is causing already by making decisions that are dangerous, biased, unreliable and often unaccountable. But science-fiction scenarios, often reported by hungry media with accompanying pictures of the Terminator, have proven to be a useful displacement activity to confronting present dangers.

The AI Summit should draw on the UK’s broad base of researchers from a range of disciplines, in companies as well as universities, and it should ensure that all perspectives, not just those of scientists and entrepreneurs, are heard.

Building a community

Speaking at London Tech Week on 14 June, Chloe Smith, acting secretary of state for science, technology and innovation, announced a major investment by UK Research and Innovation in responsible AI, for which I am part of the leadership team. We have £31 million and five years to convene and support a community of researchers trying to ensure that AI is directed towards social goals, rather than being driven by scientists’ excitement or tech companies’ search for a new profit centre.

Weighed against the vast amounts of money being invested in the technology, even a large UKRI programme seems small. But the forthcoming summit is an opportunity to use our leverage to change the debate. It must not be wasted. 

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

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

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Proposals for REF 2028 are quietly revolutionary, say James Wilsdon, Stephen Curry and Elizabeth Gadd

Six months after it started rolling, the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment is gathering momentum. Almost 600 organisations in more than 40 countries have signed up to its underpinning agreement, with dozens more joining each week.

In mid-May, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, on which Coara builds, marked its 10th anniversary with events around the world. At a national level, there are ongoing or proposed reforms to assessment frameworks in Australia, Czech Republic, Italy, New Zealand and Sweden.

Even China is making a renewed drive to break the power of the ‘four onlys’—only papers, only titles, only education background and only awards—over the funding, hiring and promotion of researchers.

Today, the four UK higher education funders add their voices to this swelling chorus, with the publication of initial decisions on the design of the 2028 Research Excellence Framework. Alongside these, an advisory group chaired by Peter Gluckman, president of the International Science Council, has published its independent audit of the UK’s assessment system.

Inside number nine

Although the REF 2028 document includes points for further consultation, this essentially marks the end of the two-year Future Research Assessment Programme (Frap). The direction is set, with finer details to follow.

Since 1986, UK universities have lived through eight cycles of national research assessment. These have evolved and become more complex: REF 2021 involved 157 institutions submitting more than 185,000 research outputs and 6,700 impact case studies from 76,000 staff.

This has given the REF a rather daunting reputation globally as a framework to study, but not necessarily emulate. So the Frap’s outcomes will spark interest here and overseas.

If not the total revamp that some hoped for, today’s conclusions are quietly revolutionary. They continue the process that began with REF 2014 of broadening evaluation from being primarily about research outputs (rebranded in the new report as contributions to knowledge and understanding, to be more inclusive of datasets and other formats), to placing more weight on societal impacts (now engagement and impact) and an expanded category of people, culture and environment.

In 2028, outputs will account for 50 per cent of the assessment, down from 60 per cent in 2014. This falls short of the Gluckman review’s call for the three pillars to be equally weighted, but nevertheless represents a shift towards embracing research culture and practice as vital to any concept of research excellence. It also makes equal weightings a stronger possibility for the cycle after REF 2028.

The human touch

From our perspective, as co-authors of the 2022 report Harnessing the Metric Tide, commissioned to inform the Frap process, there is a huge amount to welcome. In particular, three aspects seem particularly positive.

First, a refreshed trio of purposes clarifies what the REF is trying to achieve. While care will be needed to prevent the stated aim to provide “insights into the health of UK research” turning into a licence to rank, a clearer sense of purpose will shape discussions of costs, benefits, opportunities and burdens. A firm date for the next assessment also gives universities a definitive timetable.

Second, in line with our advice on the responsible uses of metrics and a separate analysis of the potential for using artificial intelligence in research assessment, led by Mike Thelwall, the REF’s architects have wisely decided not to opt for a fully automated or metrics-based approach.

These and other methodological options will be kept under review, which also makes sense, particularly if accompanied by investment in the open infrastructures needed to support intelligent and responsible uses of quantitative data.

We also welcome the commitment to identifying and consulting on new “data for good” to help recognise progress under the people, culture and environment pillar of REF 2028. This element will be further strengthened by the adoption of a structured narrative format for submissions, following a planned consultation on the details.

No more individuals

Third, changes to the method for measuring the size of submissions are big news. These will sever the link between individuals and submitted outputs, finally fulfilling one aim of the 2016 Stern Review.

By using an average measure drawn from the data that universities routinely return to the Higher Education Statistics Authority, this rolls the process of identifying staff with significant responsibility for research, the criteria for REF submission, into business as usual, rather than making it a one-off exercise.

So farewell minimum and maximum numbers of contributions per individual, and hello to fully aggregated contribution pools for each unit of assessment. Implemented with care to ensure that the spread of an institution’s research is still fairly represented, in line with the report’s wider principle that “supporting a healthy research culture should be an underpinning principle of the REF”, this may strengthen the emphasis on positive research environments and the team-based nature of much high-quality research.

So, overall, this is a positive package. The four UK funding bodies—and particularly the team at Research England led by Jessica Corner, Steven Hill and Catriona Firth—deserve congratulations for steering a complex process of evidence gathering and consultation towards a set of radical yet pragmatic conclusions.

They could have moved further and faster towards formative modes of assessment aimed at shaping the system as well as surveying it, in line with more ambitious signals in the Gluckman review. And they might, as our report suggested, have offered a longer-term roadmap for change over multiple REF cycles. But you can’t win ’em all, and even the REF’s fiercest detractors should find reasons to give a clap or two to the Frap.

James Wilsdon is director of the Research on Research Institute and professor of research policy at University College London. 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. Elizabeth Gadd is research culture and quality lead at Loughborough University, and vice-chair of the Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment.

On Wednesday 5 July, UCL, in partnership with the Foundation for Science and Technology, the Research on Research Institute and Research England, will host an open forum on The Emerging Shape of REF 2028. The event is free to attend in person and online.

A version of this article appeared in Research Fortnight

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Women scientists don’t need to lean in, they need science to change, says Gemma Derrick

Athene Donald is well placed to comment on gender inequality in scientific research and careers. She is emeritus professor in experimental physics at the University of Cambridge and that university’s first Gender Equality Champion. She has supported and advised on many programmes and policies aimed at promoting research careers for women. 

These personal experiences form the foundations of her new book, Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science. As a physicist, her focus on science makes perfect sense; as an Oxbridge professor, not all will recognise her view of academic life, although many of her experiences will resonate with female readers.  

What she doesn’t do, though, is build out from this to a more systemic analysis or critique of the issue. Gender disparities
are present right across academia; they stem from professional and intellectual structures rooted in a specific interpretation of excellence that actively excludes women.  

Women make up the majority of undergraduate and master’s students. But as university staff, they get paid on average less than men for doing the same job and are woefully underrepresented in senior positions. 

Donald’s focus on the personal means that, while this is the book to get readers angry about such unfairness, it misses both the complexity of the issue and the point that it is science that needs to change, not women. 

Weak reasoning

By one recent estimate, at current rates men and women will not be equally represented as authors in the physical, space and Earth sciences until 2063. The factors that Donald highlights may well explain why men came to outnumber women in science. But they are not why inequity persists, or why the gap is closing so slowly. 

The reality is that gender disparity does not persist because there is a dearth of female PhD candidates, or because children lack female scientific role models. Nor is it because girls’ mothers give them dolls rather than Lego or chemistry sets (I was given all three).

More important, this viewpoint means that the lessons and remedies that Donald offers are unlikely to result in science’s gender gaps closing more quickly. She writes about how male mentors supported her career and life choices—introducing her to other (male) professors in the field during her postdoc, and supporting her decision to have children. She lauds the benefits and importance of mentorship, and discusses broader evidence of the links between mentoring and success.

But such relationships can also turn toxic, potentially destroying an individual’s self-confidence and career. Female researchers are more likely to experience these toxic relationships and suffer the consequences, which, in turn, work to exacerbate inequalities. 

This is one area where a broader view would have helped: Donald does not offer the ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ counterfactual, asking what it would have meant for her career if, as is still the case for most female researchers, she had not been so ‘lucky’.

As a result, Not Just for the Boys reads something like an academic version of the ex-Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In. Both Sandberg and Donald wonder why there are so few female leaders, and both suggest how women should act to get ahead. 

Both offer women tools that provide encouragement to persist, but also messages to knuckle under and reasons for fatalism. 

Often, this means that the path to success comes across as a recommendation to act more like men. This risks sending a message that women’s failure to gain parity in science, tech or any other field is at least partly down to their own experiences and decisions.

But in science, the problem is the structure of the system, not women’s choices and behaviour. Academia is still shaped by criteria for success that were defined by men and are controlled by people—mostly men—who believe that any system that brought them to the top must be a meritocracy.

By failing to convey that it is the system that is failing women, or interrogating how that system is organised and governed, Not Just for the Boys does not provide the spark for the gender revolution that science needs.  

This is a shame, because accelerating the journey towards gender parity across academia requires a fundamental change to structures that disadvantage women systematically, unconsciously and directly. It is not the responsibility of individuals to be any one
type of person to achieve a scientific career; it is the responsibility of the system to accommodate difference. 

Gemma Derrick is an associate professor in the Centre for Higher Education Transformations at the University of Bristol

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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