Here’s a mid-year recap of some of the work and projects that the Research Consulting team have been progressing recently. It covers a few threads including our involvement and contributions to recent events and conferences, our international work, and some of the themes present in our recent work. We conclude with a look forward to “upcoming” areas of work which might pique your interest!
Out and about
As a small consultancy, whose projects are all bespoke for clients, maintaining strong connections with our client communities is really important. So far, 2024 has provided some excellent opportunities to hit the road and meet colleagues, clients and old friends at events across our areas of work: scholarly communications, research management, knowledge exchange and impact. Here’s a quick round up of our travels so far in 2024.
The season kicked off in January with Rob heading to Kenya to visit the team at KEMRI-Wellcome Trust as part of a Wellcome-funded project to review approaches to the sharing of genomic data during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was also able to visit one of our many international associates, Joy Owango, and her team at TCC Africa in Nairobi.
In February, Dan attended the Council of Deans of Health Research and Innovation Conference and Andrea presented a talk on “‘Breaking Boundaries: AI’s influence on open research discoverability and impact’” at the Open Research London event at The Francis Crick Institute.
In March, Rob chaired the Research and Scholarly Publishing Forum at The London Book Fair, before heading up to Glasgow in April to share findings from his work with Elle on the changing nature of learned society publishing at the UKSG 2024 conference. Both are major events in the scholarly communications calendar which attract delegates from around the world each year – including: librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants. In May, Rob was at the Technical University of Vienna to present at CRIS 2024, where the theme of the conference was ‘emerging trends for international collaboration in the CRIS domain’.
June was a busy month! Dan and Frances made the trip to Blackpool for PraxisAuril’s 2024 conference, where Dan chaired a session on partnerships and ecosystems and big news came in the form of the announcement of the change from PraxisAuril to “Knowledge Exchange UK”. Next stop was Brighton for the ARMA 2024 conference, where Rob, Lucia, Andrea, and Dan made it a team effort, involving a presentation on institutional approaches to support research integrity (drawing on recent and current work for the UK Committee on Research Integrity), a poster based on the research contracts benchmarking work and we took an exhibitor stand for the first time.
At the end of June. Ellie attended AESIS’ societal impact of scientific research’ conference in Dublin, and coming up in July, Angharad will be attending the CILIP 2024 conference in Birmingham: the UK’s leading event for the library, information and knowledge community.
International
Whilst much of our work is focused on UK institutions and clients, international contexts and clients also feature strongly in our work. For example, our work for Wellcome on genomic data generation through to research uptake will see Lucia visiting The Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in July, and Ellie will visit the Birat Nepal Medical Trust in Kathmandu, Nepal, to meet and interview Wellcome-funded researchers.
Finally, we have recently completed a project for cOAlition S on the topic of innovation and reform in scholarly communication, including a broad multi-stakeholder consultation as well as a global survey of researchers. Our final report, which investigated cOAlition S’ proposal “Towards Responsible Publishing”, is available via Zenodo and was developed in close collaboration with the Leiden Centre for Science and Technology Studies.
Themes and areas in our work
So, what have we been working on recently? Research culture, integrity and support systems have featured strongly in our recent work, but we’ve also been working on evaluations and research impact.
Important work on research culture continues, and we’re currently working on three projects linked with interventions supporting aspects of research culture across staff groups and underrepresented groups. In addition, we have continued to support research and scholarly communication stakeholders in increasing levels of openness and research integrity, with a focus on sharing the best research practices: ensuring reproducibility and promoting a culture of transparency and accountability throughout the research process.
Research systems are increasingly an element of our work, often tied to reviews of structures, resources, and processes within research and KE teams. This year, we’ve undertaken work for Jisc on equipment data harvesting and supported research management system requirements and investment options for a large UK university. We’re keeping a close eye on the wider market for research systems and the emergence of new functionality that addresses pain points for research offices and researchers (timesheets being a good example). We are about to start another project for a UK university reviewing research data management, building on previous reviews of systems and support mechanisms for the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and Southampton.
We continue to deliver evaluations for funders and programme delivery teams. This year our work includes evaluations of institutional programmes supporting research culture, and funding schemes delivered by funders: including the British Academy and Royal Society.
Demonstrating research impact has also featured strongly for us recently. The impact reports we helped deliver for Salford and Liverpool John Moores universities were published, and we’ve worked on several development projects for individual universities and their case studies, including in Ireland.
Coming up
Coming up, we are planning a project to look at the issue of researcher development in the UK and Australia, along similar lines to our previous benchmarking approaches to research contracts (in 2023 and 2018) and research offices (for ARMA). This distinctive approach focuses on remits, resources, and trends and has been requested by one of the past participants in the research contracts work.
We are in the early stages of exploring a similar study in the field of research ethics and governance and also launched our approach to supporting institutions for REF 2029 at ARMA. This features the rocky road to REF timeline, which proved a popular take home from our stand at the ARMA conference.
Looking ahead to the autumn, Rob and Andrea will be back on the road at a number of publishing and scholarly communication events, including ALPSP, OASPA, the Frankfurt Book Fair and the UKSG November Conference.
You can find contact details for all of our team members on our website so if you’d like to hear more about any of the above, or fix a time to speak, just drop us a line.
