Here it is, the annual Research Consulting ‘review of the year’ blog, building on our 2024 mid-year update, and our past updates in 2023, 2022 and 2021.
2024 in Numbers
It’s been a busy year: over the course of 2024, we have worked on 56 different projects for a total of 37 clients in the UK and internationally.
Notable public reports this year include our work for the UK Committee for Research Integrity (UKCORI) exploring indicators of research integrity, the report for Jisc on data to support equipment sharing and the national equipment data service, and the publication of the work with 24 universities on research contracts management. In July, we published the outcomes from work for cOAlition S with an international partnership, including Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies and academics from the UK, Africa, and China. Following a global stakeholder consultation, this was published as “Towards Responsible Publishing” in July.
We thank the teams at Research Consulting and CWTS for carrying out this important work and are particularly grateful to the 11,600 researchers who shared their voices during the consultation. We count on the research community to help us take forward our shared vision for a better and more responsible scholarly communication ecosystem.
2024 clients include 15 different universities in the UK and Ireland, stretching from Glasgow to Plymouth, and from Galway to Essex. Some of the big themes in this area of our work have included:
- Research support structures, processes, and systems
- Research culture and the views and experiences of researchers
- Research impact, knowledge exchange, and supporting external partnerships
- Research data management
Those with whom we have worked on more than one project during the year include Wellcome, the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Jisc, UKRI, Springer Nature, and several universities including Oxford, Nottingham, and Teesside.
Other clients in 2024 illustrate the range of engagements and work the team deliver across the research landscape, and include: Brain Tumour Research, the European Commission, PraxisAuril, cOAlition S, BMJ, The British Academy, the UK Reproducibility Network, and the International Association of STM Publishers.
Our continued thanks to our clients, partners, and stakeholders for inviting us to work in such interesting areas.
Team News
Changes to the Research Consulting team brought new faces: Liz Allen joined in September and, just a few days ago, Katie Fraser joined us. Now at 12 people, the team is bigger than we have ever been. The additional expertise at senior levels expands our capability and experience in key areas: research funders, publishing, academic libraries, and open research.
Along the way, we have announced well-deserved promotions for Lucia Loffreda (who joined us in 2018) and Frances Palmer (who joined us in 2022), to Senior Consultant and Senior Associate Consultant, respectively.
It is also timely to recognize and celebrate the excellent work of our back-office team of Sophie Tinley and Diane Revill, who between them keep the finances, office, and pretty much everything in good order.
What Happens Next?
We don’t always find out what clients do after our work is completed. But a few discussions recently have shed light on how past work continues to deliver benefit for our clients. At the recent Universities UK Research and Innovation conference, I had the pleasure of catching up with three past clients who talked about how the reports we provided 2-3 years ago are still actively contributing to their work.
Another public example is the OA Journals Toolkit, a project we finished in 2023, which continues to be translated into additional languages, most recently French and Arabic.
These examples are a testament to our guiding philosophy – to produce reports and recommendations that deliver actionable insights for clients.
Things Changing
In the midst of the current financial news within the higher education sector, it’s easy to overlook another important change: 2024 is the last year of ERDF income. As a funding scheme, it was much criticized as being overly bureaucratic. But let’s not forget the positives – and just from my own experience, ERDF has catalyzed some transformational activities, including a pilot project for post-graduate placements into SMEs, which founded a core capability that is still going and firmly sits in the “essential” box.
More broadly, ERDF projects were a great pathway to bring new skills and people into roles supporting research and KE. Research England will undoubtedly need to revise their approach to ‘regeneration’ measures in KEF and HE-BCI, but I also wonder what will happen to the wider landscape of SME engagement by universities into 2025 and beyond?
Systems have been a feature of our work recently, exemplified in recent work for Jisc and the University of Oxford, and in past work, we have accessed Researchfish data to inform UKRI impact evaluations. So, it was with interest that we saw the recent announcement from UKRI regarding an open procurement for impact collection. Researchfish has been a key feature of the UKRI reporting landscape for over 10 years, so it will be interesting to see what follows in this space when the existing arrangement expires in April 2025.
LinkedIn continues to be our main communication platform, but the use of Bluesky by the sector seemed to explode in the last quarter of 2024, and we are now active on this platform. We do still use the other one, as many key clients and organizations continue to operate there, but there does appear to be a steady movement towards Bluesky, with many key funders and sector organizations making the jump.
So, 2024 is nearly over and so we take this opportunity to wish our clients, colleagues, and friends a restful and peaceful Christmas break!
