if you could start again...
Branwen Hide
Tuesday, 23 June 2009 13:50 UTC
I was asked the following question this morning…
If you could start with a blank slate, how would you set up a research base in the UK?
I have to admit I was a bit stumped and mumbled something about training and policy makers that actually talked to each other…But it is actually a very difficult questions as in reality you will never have a blank slate to start with.
I now pass the question on to you.
If you had ultimate power what would you do?
- If you want you can start now and talk about changes you would make and things you would like to see.*
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Good question! Of course I would like to see excellent research, and equally, excellent inspirational teaching. So, I’d probably reduce the number of universities (shoot me!) and set up a much more free-flowing system between active researchers, teaching and high-schools – I mean school students visiting researchers and researchers visiting schools, regularly, so that people in schools can see what they could be like or doing at the end of it all, instead of the rather tired, prescriptive way science is taught now.
Like Google, all researchers would have a 20 per cent time, in which they could either do something like this (education), or write for the general readers, or some other imaginative activity that isn’t research but uses their research in some way for others.
Researchers would also qualify for mini-sabbaticals of (say) three months, if they think of some really good activity they could undertake in that time (for example, writing a website on core principles of their branch of science for the general public, including students, or learning how to teach high-school students and spending a term in a high school teaching science).I’d also issue a challenge, with a really fantastic reward, for a “career metric” by which someone’s success could be judged by the whole of their output and not just one part of it.
Lots of other ideas, but that’s a start. You get the drift, I am keen on integrating science into society much more, rather than having it pigeonholed off into some ivory tower (all the time, of course we need ivory towers some of the time.)
Underlying all of this is the need to get young people really engaged and fired up by the power that a scientific education can give them to go in all kinds of wonderful mental directions and to discover wonderful things. And what better way to do that than to regularly interact with the people who are already doing those things?
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I have to agree.
However one other thing I think is required is better communication between those that are responsible for policies relating to universities, science, research, and education. Right now there are a few policies out there that contradict each other. Also so many tend to be based on what people perceive is the case instead of what is actually happening and what researchers actually want.
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just came across the following blog on Scienceinsider – seems to be the hot topic at the meoment.
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If there’s one thing I’d set up from the start it is a network of central resource centres of various kinds. Probably a few of each kind across the regions. These would provide analytical and other services: assays such as proteomic analysis, cytometry, sequencing and so on; bioinformatics support; central data management (with shared tools and really cracking support people, such as NERC have at CEH in Oxford [NEBC]). There are bits of stuff like this scattered around but it’s not close to what I’d like. We’re missing out on potentially huge economies of scale and the potential to provide reliable service — at the moment, expensive equipment is either needlessly duplicated or plain out of reach, and expertise is not concentrated or passed on in any kind of reliable fashion. Some institutes approximate the role, and there have been attempts that have emerged from certain initiatives (for example, BBSRC’s understanding gene function initiative of a few years back), some of which persist (and do good stuff), but too often the pseudo-economics of such things usually spell death.
And @ Maxine, as I hinted at in another discussion on here, within RIN we’ve been discussing exactly how to reward scientists for a wider set of activities than simply publishing. What we’ll be discussing early next month is a mechanism where (as a start) the release of data sets and other things can be recognised through a combination of a DOI (on the data set) and some kind of digital passport for those who contributed. So a person’s record would have not just publications and citations of those publications listed but also data releases and (perhaps with a bit of work to make something like a PRS equivalent to check/enforce) their reuse (=citation). The mechanism could be extended to include credits for time spent training new postdocs, doing outreach work, lots of things (though the equvalency thing could get tricky, the problem of what to do about reuse of very small submissions [e.g., a sequence in GenBank] is thorny and as ever there would be a legacy issue).
I’m jumping the gun a bit tbh, but if eveything goes well over the next year (basically, if Wellcome like our next application and RIN and the BL help), there could be enough progress to petition those working on the RAE to look at including such a wider measure of worth.
My personal interest (though I like all the aspects of the idea, which totally isn’t mine btw I’m just a self-appointed cheerleader) is to get people to do a better job of reporting — good will is a write-off, and ‘sticks’ only get the bare minimum to avoid being hit. However, robust credit for reuse of data sets would get people to do the best possible job of annotating, structuring and releasing data, because just as with a paper, the better the job you do, the more they will get reused (more often, and more widely in terms of the scope of their applicabilty). And better data annotation etc. = more reuse = better value for the public’s investment in science and (one would hope) = a more efficient science (/humanitities/whatever).
The BL are of course well into their DOIs etc., and then there’s some kind of European registry that may be the right kind of thing for joining up stuff and people. I’ve also been pointed at a geoscience journal that (almost, kind of) publishes data sets with only a vestigial paper, which if rolled out more generally and pushed to its logical conclusion may be another way to bridge to more general use of DOIs. It’s all a bit fluid right now but I’m well up for it (and I’m not the only one it seems — I keep bumping into parallel discussions to this one).
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Concise as ever… Sorry :\
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I would like to combine Maxine’s free-flowing system (and effectively push it one step further) with Branwen’s about improving communication between researchers and policy makers. What about a jury-like system where researchers would be called to help policy makers think through an issue, for a certain amount of time, say a couple of blocks of a couple of weeks.
In my scientific research from scratch, there would be an incentive for researchers to, as Maxine suggested, get their nose out of their test-tubes/grant applications/papers/books/what-not, have a good look around and a good chat, about what their work as well as how the public perceives their work. I am glad BBSRC and others put some effort on communicating the gist of scientific research, but sometimes i am worried people will feel like they are being talked down by those scientists-who-always-know-better. I may be talking out from my bottom and this might have been thoroughly thought through already, but i think it is important to emphasise on the need for a dialogue with the public, not just a seducing explanation. What about public driven research projects ? ;)
And obviously there would be to make up some funding bodies, maybe prioritising certain research areas, so on so forth. Would you guys leave the current situation as it is?
I believe more value should be given to basic science, maybe an incentive system again, to tackle research that might bring a change in paradigm (i am paraphrasing a funding program from UCL here, remember the one that was by-passing peer-review selection ?). Impose on funding bodies to allow a certain percentage of the allocated money to be used for basic research? This is effectively happening in the better off than most labs actually. -
I don’t know about “set up”, but finding drives everything, so if you want to re-organise the research base you would have to re-organise the funding.
Two of the (related) things that have changed the most in my years in the biz (approx a quarter of a century) are:
(i) the fraction of people’s time that goes into chasing funding, which is vastly increased from the old days;
(ii) the ability to do research in Univs if you don’t have a sizeable grant, which is vastly decreased to the point of being close to nil.
(ii) to some extent explains (i), as without a grant these days you are dead, basically.
When I started in the Univs, most academics had half a technician to help them, and as research was cheap it was not necessary to have a grant to fund a PhD student’s experimental work. So in the red-brick Univs you would have a fair number of labs consisting of an academic, a technician 2.5 days / wk and a PhD student. Then you would have more “thrusting” labs, run by Profs or Profs-in-waiting, with grant funding and postdocs.
In the current system, the person with no grant would have no technical support (as this now comes only on a grant) and no PhD student (as most Depts would direct them away from such labs to ones with funding which are seen to provide a better training environment).
Having the grant run out nowadays is thus is a bit like getting relegated from the Premier League to the Championship; you have one, perhaps two years to get another one before the “parachute payment” runs out. After that the climb back up again will become incredibly difficult. So the reality is that people in this setting will do no science while they desperately scramble for funding.
The consequent “get funded or die” grant chase also means, I would argue, a decreased “diversity” of the UK research base. The most obvious example, which many people will be familiar with, is the precipitous decline in the 80s and 90s in UK labs doing in vivo research, which was seen to be slow and unproductive, and not what the funders wanted. If it is possible to keep going without a big grant, such labs can keep alive and the skills and ideas do not die out. If the labs need a grant to survive, they go under. A decade later you have to set up special new initiatives to train in vivo scientists, since all the people that used to train them are now retired or not doing research any more.
The major objections to the old system were seen to be unaccountability and that it fostered, and indeed funded, complacency. However, it is not clear to me that the present set-up is really better.
Anyway, what to do?
Here is a vaguely radical proposal. I would suggest that ALL academic posts in UK science Departments rated above a certain (deliberately low) RAE grade threshold should come with a minimal level of “running cost” research funding (say £ 10-15 K/yr). This would be “seedcorn” research funding to enable people to do stuff, whether “bridging” a salary for a month, subsidising PG students’ work, replacing equipment, funding their own expts., whatever. I have lost count of the academics/PIs I know who tell me that they are stymied because the grant has finished and they don’t have the money, or personnel, to wrap up the experimental work and publish it until they get another one.
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Oh dear. Killed another thread. Was that last post too barking?
It really was a serious suggestion, BTW. All British research-intensive Universities’ science models are based upon the idea that every research-active academic should have at least one grant almost all of the time. As the cost of science, and of the increasing burden of accompanying admin, rises, it seems clear that this is going to be untenable.
One logical consequence, as Maxine alluded too earlier, would be less academic scientists, and/or less research-intensive Universities. Another would be to re-organise the way the funding is distributed.
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Not barking at all, in my opinion, Austin! The opposite, in fact.
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Ha! Fully agree with you Austin re. funding, this is clearly a big issue these days. I probably got a bit shy on the topic on my post, but i do believe the way forward is actually a little step backward (!) and going for an in-between the current situation and some sort of “laissez-faire” where researchers would have some kind of money allocated automatically just because (1) as you pointed out not everyone will be able to secure responsive mode grants and (2) the next paradigm shift will most likely come from a project that won’t make it through peer-review/responsive mode in the first place.
One could say funding is the biggest issue actually: it has been influencing researchers behaviour (broadly speaking, not just scientifically) in a dramatic way. Competition is only good to the extend that it favours inspiration and innovation. Competition for survival is another kettle of fish. Some talent, time and money are being wasted here.
So yes, it might well be that there are to many researchers around. Then do we really want to produce more scientists by making scientific careers more attractive? I am acting as the devil’s advocate here, but i do believe things are not so simple, but making science sound cool for kids is equally simplistic. Or one has to define “cool” for instance. My “cool” science would hold strong ties with the society in which it is taking place. I guess i am not so much a supporter of the ivory tower then ;) At least not the feeling of sacred isolation (from the rest of society) it confers to its host.
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