The metascience unit will fund studies that analyse UK research in the hope of boosting its quality and efficiency.Credit: Sanjeri/Getty
With the launch of a metascience unit late last year, the United Kingdom became one of the first countries to formalize the practice of using scientific methodology to study how research is done. The question now is whether it will produce insights to help elevate UK research and, if so, whether this will influence other countries to launch their own metascience initiatives.
The UK metascience unit was announced in November, under the previous Conservative government, and will continue under the Labour government that took power last month. Its remit is to explore better ways of conducting, publishing and reviewing UK research, as well as distributing and funding it. More broadly, the unit is focused on improving the overall quality and efficiency of UK research.
The project will be run jointly by the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and national funder UK Research and Innovation, in partnership with Open Philanthropy, a charitable research funder based in San Francisco, California, which is contributing £2 million (US$2.6 million) of the total £5 million for the first call for applications.
The first call for grant proposals went out in April, seeking applications from UK researchers from all disciplines who want to conduct metascience studies in their area of expertise, says Stian Westlake, executive chair of the UK Economic and Social Research Council, who was involved in setting up the unit. Applications are also welcomed from dedicated metascience researchers, such as those working in science and technology studies, scientometrics and bibliometrics. Topics of interest include innovations in peer review, funding processes and reproducibility.
Studying science
Applications will be reviewed by a panel of representatives of the UK government, Open Philanthropy and academics in relevant fields, and a maximum of £300,000 will be distributed to each successful grant applicant for a period of between six months and two years.
“It’s not a huge amount of money,” says James Wilsdon, a research policy scholar at University College London, who will be the panel’s chair, but “it’s certainly a very positive step forward”. He adds: “It’s encouraging to see any government or funding organization taking seriously the need for more systematic, robust meta-scientific evidence to inform decision strategies and the managing and monitoring of research innovation systems.” Wilsdon is also founding director of the Research on Research Institute, a UK-based consortium.
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The review process for grant applications will be similar to what UK researchers are used to when applying for government grants, at least for the first funding call, says Westlake. He adds that there are no plans yet to experiment with the review process, although insights from the studies funded by the metascience unit could inform future processes. “We’re not quite in the realm of meta-metascience yet,” he says.
Katy Börner, an information scientist at Indiana University Bloomington, hopes that findings that stem from research funded by the metascience unit will inform decisions by policymakers, funders, educators and other influential groups. Börner notes that it has been difficult to secure funding for research on research in the past.
Behavioural nudges
The launch of the metascience unit follows another initiative in 2010, when the coalition UK government at the time opened a ‘nudge unit’. The unit was dedicated to using insights from behavioural sciences to inform public policy, by ‘nudging’ people to make certain decisions that were in their own interest — for example, prompting people to meet their tax deadlines and avoid fines. The idea stemmed from the 2008 book Nudge, by US economists Richard Thaler — who won the Nobel prize in economic science for his work on the topic in 2017 — and Cass Sunstein.
After the United Kingdom, nudge units were launched in countries including the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, India, Indonesia, Singapore and Peru. The UK nudge unit, formally called the Behavioural Insights Team, produces regular working papers and reports on the outcomes of experiments it conducts. It was acquired in 2021 by London-based innovation charity Nesta.
Wilsdon says it’s possible that other countries will see the UK metascience unit and want to launch similar initiatives. “Things become fashionable and they travel around,” he says. “Maybe this is the first of many. Who knows?”
Barbara Lancho Barrantes, a scientometrician at the University of Brighton, UK, is not sure whether the idea of a metascience unit can be rolled out in or be applicable to all countries. Every country has its own priorities and resources, she says, and research funding is already scarce in many regions.
Long-term outlook
The search for innovative approaches to funding science has been gaining traction elsewhere. In September, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it is partnering with the Institute for Progress, a think tank based in Washington DC, to find new ways of funding research. A standout feature of the deal is that it sought to give academics better access to internal NSF data, which is typically not released to external entities, even if it is to analyse their own processes.
The first big challenge for the UK metascience unit will be to ensure that it is funding a good mixture of short-term, eye-catching projects and projects that aim to produce longer-term evidence and insights into how well the system is working, says Wilsdon.
“The big win for me would be less about short-term project wins and more about long-term system reform,” says Wilsdon. This would mean the United Kingdom has the “structures and systems of metascientific data and analysis that it needs over the medium and long term to actually make intelligent decisions about the system”, he adds.
