What is research culture
UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) vision is for an outstanding research and innovation system in the UK that gives everyone the opportunity to contribute and to benefit, enriching lives locally, nationally and internationally.
The success of the research system depends on the people working within it. To answer complex research questions requires a diverse community of people in a wide range of roles, along with a culture that welcomes difference and supports constructive debate and challenge.
How we support the full range of people and ideas in research and innovation, connected through a diversity of career pathways is key to creating a highly effective research culture.
To help understand what we mean by research culture, we refer to the Royal Society’s definition:
Research culture encompasses the behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes and norms of our research communities. It influences researchers’ career paths and determines the way that research is conducted and communicated.
Building on this definition, UKRI-commissioned work on research culture has set out a framework to provide a holistic view of the many aspects of research culture, to provide a consistent way of describing the values and behaviours that underpin open, inclusive, constructive, and supportive research cultures.
The framework identifies four major overlapping areas:
- how research is managed and undertaken: including aspects such as governance and management, research integrity and sustainability
- how research ensures value for communities, society, culture and the economy: including open research, communication and realising impact through translation and commercialisation
- how people are supported: including recruitment and employment, recognition and assessment, professional and career development and healthy working environments
- how individuals engage with each other: including leadership and management, empowerment of individuals and collegiality
Why research culture is crucial for a thriving research and innovation system
There is a body of evidence on why and how research culture supports, or can act against, a thriving research and innovation system. Reports such as the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on the culture of scientific research in the UK (2014) document factors that act against a conducive research culture.
These include the nature of competition in research funding, lack of career progression and heavy workload pressures, in addition to the way that research is narrowly viewed and assessed.
Various reports such as What researchers think about the culture they work in (Wellcome Trust 2020) and Realising our potential: backing talent and strengthening UK research culture and environment (Russell Group 2021) further provide evidence that research and innovation thrive in environments where everyone values working with people who are not like them, who have different ideas and different ways of thinking.
As part of its work on research culture, the Royal Society also ran the programme Changing Expectations which aimed to understand how best to support the research community in developing supportive cultures. Outputs were summarised in their Changing Expectations conference report (2019).
Acting on the recommendations of the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry into research integrity (2018), UKRI commissioned Vitae in partnership with the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) and the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) to undertake Research integrity: a landscape study (2020).
Its aim was to develop a clear understanding of the incentives and pressures in the research system, and how these affect research behaviour in the context of research integrity, as well as more broadly.
The government’s R&D People and Culture Strategy (2021) recognises all these long-standing issues and acts as a ‘call to action’ encouraging the whole sector to attract and retain talent, raise productivity and contribute to lasting change. Building on existing work, it sets out government commitments to co-create a vision of the culture we want to see in the sector and make the UK a great place for discovery, innovation, and progress.
UKRI support for research culture
UKRI, which reaches across the whole research and innovation system, is in a unique position to incentivise values and behaviours that support the creativity and collaboration needed to drive progress in research and innovation and capture all its benefits.
The government’s R&D People and Culture Strategy (2021) sets out a vision for ensuring the research system is made up of talented and diverse people with the right skills, working in an environment that nurtures and gets the best out of everyone.
Across UKRI our approach to supporting research culture is multifaceted. UKRI is delivering on a number of the commitments set out in the government’s R&D People and Culture Strategy through our People, Culture and Talent portfolio.
We experiment, innovate and reflect on our own systems and processes, and how these can influence and shape the wider system. However, we know the evidence base for many initiatives is not strong.
This is why, as with everything we do, we are committed to capturing the outcomes of our initiatives and, as an innovative funder, feeding them back into our work to drive continuous improvement, and to share, learn and develop best practice.
We also invest. For example, the Enhancing Research Culture funding (England only funding) can be used by higher education providers (HEPs) in any of the areas covered by the government’s R&D People and Culture Strategy to pilot new initiatives, increase the scale of already-proven activities and continue activities already supported via this funding stream.
HEPs are able to work alone, in collaboration with other HEPs or organisations outside of the higher education sector in line with their own strategic objectives and priorities. We monitor the impacts of this funding to help inform and share good practice.
This explainer sets out further examples of the approaches we are taking to foster the research culture needed for research and innovation excellence, in which people can thrive.
How research is managed and undertaken
MRC Centres of Research Excellence (CoRE)
The Medical Research Council (MRC) is changing the way it funds long-term research in its units and centres, to foster challenge-led collaborative research in an environment which nurtures a positive research culture. MRC Centres of Research Excellence (CoRE) will be beacons of excellence in research culture and equality, diversity and inclusion, adopting and maintaining high standards in the way research is conducted and openly communicated.
Embedding key features of a positive research culture, they will develop and nurture career paths, building research capacity and equipping researchers with the tools needed to carry out world-leading research and effectively transition between career stages.
Applicants for CoRE funding will provide a research culture action plan and a maturity model, to enable them to map how actions will help progress to full maturity. Research culture guidance has also been developed to support reviewers in assessing research culture elements as part of funding decisions.
Environmental sustainability in NERC research centres
The National Capability Multi-Centre Science programme is a £47 million investment that brings the NERC research centres together to deliver curiosity-driven, interdisciplinary research programmes to tackle some of the most significant environmental challenges facing the UK.
Due to the long-standing strategic partnership between NERC and its research centres, this investment was an opportunity to recognise actions taken by NERC research centres to enhance their own sustainability performance. Our influence in this area helps us to meet the UKRI Environmental Sustainability Strategy and NERC Responsible Business statement.
This was a pilot exercise for NERC head office and research centres to experiment to see how small changes to the funding application and assessment processes can produce big changes to the environmental and social consequences of proposals.
This included consideration of what actions in their control project teams could take to, for example, enhance the environment (in addition to reducing any environmental harm associated with the project) or engage with local communities for the mutual benefit of all.
By co-creating the measures of success and the encouragement of experimental interventions, the centres were able to clearly articulate how their proposals would deliver science excellence and support sustainability outcomes simultaneously.
The learning from this is valuable ahead of environmental sustainability being embedded into wider UKRI investment decisions by 2025 and has been shared with a wide range of UK funding bodies and policymakers so we can all move forward in a connected way to drive change together.
Research integrity
UKRI is committed to improving research integrity in the UK. Created following the recommendation by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in 2018, UKRI hosts the UK Committee on Research Integrity (UK CORI). UK CORI works across the sector to promote and drive research integrity in the UK.
Research has integrity when it is carried out in a way that is trustworthy, ethical, and responsible. UK CORI aims to explain how research integrity improves the wider environment, identify how systemic pressures affect research integrity, and improve the system to reduce these pressures and their impacts on research integrity. These same pressures have been shown to impact negatively on wider aspects of research culture.
In addition to UK CORI, UKRI is:
- strengthening its funding assurance programme including risk-based assessments of how research organisations manage their research misconduct policies and investigations
- reviewing our policy and guidelines on the governance of good research practice
- improving our policies for handling research misconduct allegations internally
Concordats and agreements
Concordats and agreements play a significant part in shaping the frameworks and practices that contribute to research cultures and environments in which UK research takes place. These initiatives have grown organically, in response to challenges and opportunities, and cover a range of issues to support researchers and their activities.
UKRI led a research concordats and agreements review exploring potential alignments to a more collective and effective approach, complementing the work of the Independent Review of Research Bureaucracy. It highlighted the following themes:
- to create a shared understanding of a positive research culture
- to better understand and streamline data and reporting requirements
- aligning with other instruments within the research ecosystem (for instance, the Research Excellence Framework)
This work represents an important and significant step forward for sector-wide collaboration, and we look forward to taking forward actions in response of the review.
Good Research Resource Hub (GRRH)
Research culture intersects with a range of UKRI policies and standards, including research integrity, open research, equality diversity and inclusion, and trusted research and innovation.
To ensure we share knowledge and resources, we have made them open and accessible to all through the Good Research Resource Hub supporting researchers, innovators and organisations to find and share good practice.
How research ensures value
Open research
Open research embodies good research practices by enabling participation in, and access to, the research lifecycle and outputs. It covers a wide range of practices and principles related to how research is carried out and enables research to take advantage of technical advances.
By improving access to research outputs according to best practices that enable research to be findable, accessible, reuseable and interoperable (the FAIR principles), researchers have more opportunity to engage, replicate and accelerate knowledge discoveries and benefit society and the economy.
Good research data-sharing and management enables publicly funded research to be more transparent, helping to increase research integrity and public trust. UKRI has research data policies that apply to all UKRI-funded research and is currently looking to update these in line with best practice.
UKRI supports the Concordat on open research data to ensure research data gathered and generated is, wherever possible, made openly available for use by others supporting an open, collaborative and efficient research and innovation system.
In 2021 UKRI announced its open access policy for research publications that acknowledge funding from UKRI. The policy applies to peer-reviewed research articles submitted on or after 1 April 2022 for publication, to ensure findings from research can be accessed and built on by the research and innovation community and wider society without restriction.
UKRI also introduced a new open access requirement for monographs, book chapters and edited collections which applies from 1 January 2024. The policy is supported by an annual fund of over £46 million.
Public engagement
Involving people in research and innovation makes it more relevant and useful for everyone. UKRI’s Public Engagement Strategy sets out how we will break down barriers between research and innovation, and society.
Two key programmes supporting this are the Community Research Networks Fund and the Community Knowledge Fund, which recognise that communities around the UK have valuable knowledge to contribute, and enable them to address issues that matter to them.
How people are supported
We need to build more opportunities for diverse career pathways enabling people to bring their skills and experiences both into, and out of, the academic research base, and to learn new skills and ideas from across the whole research and innovation system. We need a fully connected research and innovation system with a free flow of people and ideas across it.
UKRI supports a wide range of people in an equally wide range of roles, and through our 101 Jobs series we shine a light on these and some of the inspiring people who fulfil them.
Through our people and teams action plan, flagship Future Leaders Fellowships programme and ongoing development of a ‘new deal’ for postgraduate research, we support our workforce and build the resilience needed to respond with agility to the future challenges and opportunities of an increasingly research and innovation intensive economy. More can be found on how we are supporting people and careers in research and innovation in our people and careers explainer.
Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI)
The new narrative CV, the Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI), is now being used across UKRI in all funding opportunities which run on the new Funding Service that require track-record information.
The R4RI is a template which enables people to evidence a wider range of skills, experience and contributions through both qualitative and quantitative information. It ensures recognition of a wider range of activities than traditional academic CVs. Being able to see more of the person makes it easier to identify the right people and ideas needed to advance knowledge and understanding and solve complex challenges. Guidance to complete a R4RI may be tailored to specific funding opportunities.
While it is clear that traditional academic CVs do not allow the rich assessment of people and teams needed, the evidence base for the effectiveness of narrative CVs is so far limited.
This is in part due to their relatively recent creation (see Royal Society: Résumé for Researchers), as well as a young sector-wide collaboration (see funders joint statement) to support their widespread and responsible adoption established in 2021. UKRI has hosted this collaboration which includes 60 organisations from across the global research and innovation community including funders, employers, and professional bodies.
Monitoring and evaluation of the use of R4RI-like narrative CVs is underway through use of a shared evaluation framework. Early insights from organisations using the narrative CVs have been positive, and as these findings grow they will be collated and shared on the programme’s Résumé Resources Library.
Forum for tackling bullying and harassment
Bullying and harassment have no place in research and innovation. As evidenced in Research integrity: a landscape study (2020), they have negative impacts on researchers and their health and wellbeing, and decrease research quality and integrity.
UKRI convenes the sector Forum for Tackling Bullying and Harassment in Research and Innovation. The forum works to tackle and prevent bullying and harassment by collectively and collaboratively convening organisations and people nationally and internationally, to galvanise culture change and create healthy and safe world-class research and innovation environments.
The forum supports culture change through sharing understanding, good practice, knowledge, and learning. It has co-developed a set of principles which focus on positive behaviours and culture, as well as supporting and challenging the sector, reflecting on and improving what we do to prevent and tackle bullying and harassment.
Recognition and assessment
UKRI has introduced new roles in funding applications. We have consolidated the roles on a project team when applying for funding, reducing 35 different role types to 12.
As well as bringing functionally identical roles under broader definitions and thereby helping to reduce complexity, we are better able to reflect and support the wide range of people who apply for and deliver UKRI-funded research.
Review of peer review
Peer review for the assessment of research proposals is trusted by researchers and research funders across the globe. Notwithstanding numerous advances in assessment techniques and technologies, it remains the primary means of how research and innovation proposals are assessed for funding.
UKRI commissioned Technopolis to undertake an independent review of peer review (2023) drawing on our own expertise in peer review as well as external studies, to synthesise the evidence of different types of interventions in peer review processes, their aims, strengths and weaknesses, and impact on the culture of, and people working in, research and innovation.
This innovative resource helps funders to optimise and innovate in their award-making processes. Examples of some of the recommendations include recognising that some interventions have the potential to become a ‘new normal’ to save burden or reduce bias across the board, as well as investigations into wider research culture that must continue alongside the peer review process.
UKRI will be using the findings and recommendations from the report to reflect on and evolve our own peer review processes over the coming years.
People, culture and environment in the Research Excellence Framework
Working across the four UK nations, redesign of the UK’s national research assessment exercise for HEPs offers an opportunity to reshape the incentives within the research system and rethink what should be recognised and rewarded.
Changes for Research Excellence Framework 2029 include ensuring that due recognition is given to people, culture and environments in the delivery and outcomes of research excellence, given their central importance in a vibrant and sustainable UK research system.
Key changes include:
- replacing the current ‘Environment’ section with a new ‘People, culture and environment’ section
- increasing the weighting of this section
Expanding the remit of this section will encourage institutions to consider how they foster research excellence through their support for people and teams.
Contributing to international practice
Representing our commitment to a common vision for the assessment of research, researchers and research organisations, UKRI is signatory to both the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, and is also a member of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).
UKRI also contributes to a number of projects led by the Research on Research Institute, such as:
- the uses and evaluation of narrative CVs
- a global observatory of responsible research assessment (AGORRA)
- getting responsible about AI and machine learning in research funding and evaluation (GRAIL)
We are working in close partnership with the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology to establish a metascience unit to ensure evidence-based approaches to supporting a thriving research and innovation system.
How individuals engage with each other
UKRI’s five-year strategy sets out our ambition to ‘transform tomorrow together’, with clear objectives on making the UK the top destination for talented people and teams.
To deliver these objectives we must redefine outdated views of the traditional academic research career path, making visible the diverse career pathways available and taking a more holistic approach that values the entire workforce and the breadth of skills needed to deliver excellence in research and innovation.
People in many different roles – including researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, technicians, archivists, project managers and administrators – are working together to create new knowledge, solutions, technologies, products and services, and to ensure that their benefits are realised.
Including and valuing a broader range of people and talent, as set out in our first equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) strategy (2023), helps us achieve the extraordinary potential of research and innovation to improve lives, promote economic growth, and support a knowledge economy and public services that benefit everyone.
Research England Development (RED) Fund
The Research England Development (RED) Fund supports institutional-level innovative projects in research and knowledge exchange including collaborations between education providers and between education providers and business.
A great example of this in practice is Prosper, which is an approach to career development that unlocks postdocs’ potential to thrive in multiple career pathways.
This model forms part of the sector-wide push to transform UK research culture for the better, and aligns with the goals of the UKRI people and teams actions plan (2023) and Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers. It is now freely available to the whole sector via a new online hub, the Prosper Portal.
UKRI Future Leaders Fellows
Our Future Leaders Fellowships (FLFs) are contributing to sector-wide change. To support the FLFs, in addition to funding and training opportunities, fellows can access the Future Leaders Fellowships Development Network, which offers a range of training and workshops and Plus funds designed to support the delivery of novel training and networking opportunities.
For example, the researcher wellbeing project RES-WELL is developing a toolkit to support project leaders and their funders on ethically and emotionally challenging research topics.
How to measure research culture
A positive research culture requires us all to reflect constantly on what a creative, supportive working environment looks like and make changes accordingly. This is an iterative process. Each individual and organisation will reflect in different ways and with different levers for change, as well as different views and perspectives.
It is that diversity we encourage and support as part of a healthy research culture. But given the importance of supporting difference, how can we measure progress? How might we also measure the success of our interventions?
We do not yet have the answers. However, as an innovative funder there are steps we can and are taking, including those mentioned earlier, for example the shared evaluation framework for R4RI.
Research Excellence Framework (REF) indicators
As part of the initial decisions on REF 2029, the funding bodies announced their intention to increase focus on the assessment of the conditions that are an essential feature of research excellence. To ensure the robustness of this assessment the funding bodies seek to develop a tightly structured statement which draws on outcomes-focused indicators.
Discussions within the sector have identified the need for clearly defined indicators capturing excellent outcomes from a high-quality research environment and culture that can be consistently and fairly applied and contextualised within institutional strategies and priorities.
The funding bodies are commissioning a commercial partner to develop and test methodological approaches for outcomes-focused assessment of research people, culture and environment in REF 2029. With co-production at its heart, this substantial piece of commissioned work will develop the people, culture and environment questionnaire and indicators in close collaboration with the sector.
The project will develop, test and iterate a set of quantitative and qualitative indicators of research culture, engaging widely with the sector, and providing advice to the panels during the criteria-setting phase of REF 2029.