Evgeny Bobrov, Open Data and Research Data Management Officer, at QUEST Center, Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), (© BIH/Thomas Rafalzyk) The COVID-19 pandemic requires swift reactions, which in turn makes the sharing of all available knowledge on the virus as quickly and as freely as possible an imperative.
Over the past 10 years, my colleagues and I have been doing research on research, on how academic knowledge is created (i.e. scholarly communication) and disseminated (i.e. research communication). We have been looking at how researchers collaborate and share data (here, here and here), how they perform quality checks (here), where they publish and how they engage with the public (here and here). Perhaps the most important insight I have gained
Juggling software, materials, and people In my third week of grad school, I found myself metaphorically elbows-deep in my human-robot interaction lab’s codebase. I was porting a robot teleportation interface from tablet to desktop. The goal: To run a psychology study exploring how young kids learned language skills with social robots. Jacqueline M. Kory-Westlund But comments were few and far between.
There is more than one sort of scientific research infrastructure: those that provide technology and computational capacity, and those that are supplied by the community who works with it (Baron et al., 2017). We suggest that computing research infrastructures provide an information environment that support effective research, but of themselves are insufficient to provide the insights and understanding we desire.
The infrastructures that natural sciences run on are many and varied. A mixed garden of tailormade instruments and laboratories designed to handle highly specific tasks.
When I started the physics undergraduate program in Rwanda, I wanted to pursue experimental and applied sciences that would involve using research facilities to conduct top-level scientific research for tackling real-life problems. However, there were not always enough equipment and infrastructures available.
Vannevar Bush gave us the most consequential, imaginary conceptualization of a machine for research infrastructure for the 20th century (Memex) and was one of the prime movers in the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) – a superb, if flawed, administrative research infrastructure. Superb: blue sky research; flawed: in some areas it’s been invaded by people representing particular schools of research and excluding others.
In an influential series of opinion pieces published in early 2014 (see introductory comment by Macleod et al., 2014), the medical journal The Lancet tackled the issue of “increasing value, reducing waste” in biomedical research. This series laid out in detail the issues that had led Chalmers & Glasziou to conclude in 2009 that 85% of investment in biomedical research was wasted.
Doing research and getting paid for it is fantastic, but how to do that sustainably and maintain the interest of research funders? Even funders themselves cannot give a definite answer, but some trends can be pointed out. Admittedly, there are still universities and academic systems where nepotism and feudal-like arrangements rule, and the points made here do not concern them.
Between 2016 and 2021, the UK government is channelling £1.5 billion of aid funds through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) the beneficiaries of which are primarily UK researchers. They are in turn expected to work in partnership with their counterparts and other stakeholders in the ‘global south’ and in so doing, contribute to improvements in development outcomes.
