In the second of two blogposts exploring how research impact is increasingly dependent on expertise embedded within organisations rather than traditional research outputs, Rebecca Vine and Paul Nightingale discuss the role of projects as a focus for co…
Category: Research funding
The Unintended Consequences of the pandemic on Non-COVID-19 Research Activities
Covid-19 ushered in a shift in research priorities pivoting researchers’ energies away from on-going projects. Presenting evidence from a new analysis of business, management and economics scholars, James Walker, Chris Brewster, Rita Fontinha, Washika …
For Open Grant Proposals
David Lang makes the case that default open grant proposals benefit both individual scientists as well as the broader scientific community. Science is designed to move slowly. Debate, rigor, and peer review add layers of organized skepticism to new ide…
To support civil society organisations, research funders must listen to their needs
A key premise of research impact is that the inclusion and active involvement of different stakeholders in research processes can create more useful research outcomes. One key stakeholder in many areas of social scientific research are Civil Society Or…
“Minimum expectations” are no way to value the arts, humanities, and social sciences
The UK government recently announced its intention to reduce funding for ‘low value’ degrees in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Drawing on her research into the history of higher education policy, Zoe Hope Bulaitis argues that current governm…
Putting the collective impact of global development research into perspective – What we learned from six years of the Impact Initiative
Reductions to UK aid have highlighted the need to understand both how international development research has, and can continue to, effect positive change. Here, Pauline Rose and Elizabeth Tofaris reflect on the Impact Initiative programme and what can …
Funding cuts undermine the global impact of research and its value as an emancipatory project
Responding to the recently announced cuts to UKRI’s research funding and Overseas Development Assistance programme, Nicky Armstrong and Evelyn Pauls, argue that these developments reflect a narrow conception of the impact of academic research on societ…
ARIA and Defence – A Missed Opportunity?
In February the UK government launched The Advanced Research & Invention Agency (ARIA). In this post, Emma Salisbury discusses what role the new agency might play and questions whether the transfer of this policy from its context in the US, where defence spending played a key role in the development of the agency, will deliver comparable … Continued
Short notice research funding calls are bad for researchers and research
Adam Golberg argues that short notice funding calls are an inherently poor mechanism for producing good research projects and that by reducing the time necessary for preparation, such calls introduce inequity into the selection process and potentially damage the reputation of research funders. I’ve worked in Research Development in various roles for about fifteen years, … Continued
Look to the commons for the future of R&D and science policy
A feature of the research and development landscape brought to the fore by COVID-19, has been the way in which massive public investments in collaborative open scientific research have ultimately led to zero-sum competition between companies, who hold the intellectual property rights to the outputs of this work. Samuel Moore argues, following the work of … Continued