UKRN comprises its communities: expert advocates for better research, and the networks and organisations they motivate and influence.
We currently have no core funding; all UKRN’s income is for specific, time-limited projects, such as the Open Research Programme and the Ground-Up community project. Our core operations were pump primed by rather modest initial funds and are now an emergent aspect of the funded projects. We are very grateful for those funds, of course, but it can give the impression that UKRN has deep pockets. Unfortunately, UKRN is not rich and – like the rest of the sector – is looking very hard at what it can and should sustain in very difficult times.
Here we outline our current funding and our future plans – whilst bearing that first sentence in mind; if we ever stop being that we have failed and should stop.
Firstly, projects…
These are the things that tend to grab attention – particularly the headline financial figures. For example, the total value of the Open Research Programme was £8.5m when awarded in 2021. That is a lot of money, so here is how that breaks down. The grant from Research England was £4.5m, so around half of that £8.5m was committed as in-kind contributions from the project partners. We are extremely grateful to our partners for their invaluable support for the project. Within the £4.5m of direct funding, around £3.5m went to those project partners – this may sound a lot but averages around £45k per year for each funded HEI partner and perhaps £15k per year for each non-HEI partner over five years. We are also thrilled to have had 10 HEI partners join the project that are actively participating with no grant funding at all. The central team is very lean, at an equivalent of around two full time members of staff.
With that direct and in-kind support, we have trained well over 200 specialist trainers, who have gone on to train close to 2,000 peers, and rising. We have led the Open Research Responsible Recognition and Reward (OR4) initiative, with 54 HEIs (most outside the Open Research Programme) working together to reform their recruitment and promotion practices. We have also created a resource sharing platform to enable institutions to collaborate, reuse and remix materials such as training slidedecks, and we have pioneered evaluation techniques.
It is also worth noting that the regular UKRN activities for all UKRN members – our member meetings, workshops, retreats, consultations, publications, etc. – are often organised by staff supported by this grant as well. When they are not, then they are organised by staff supported by the Ground-Up project (a £207k grant from Research England that runs for just over a year). It employs a team equivalent to 1.6 full time individuals, and is focused mainly on supporting our Local Network Leads (whereas the Open Research Programme is more focused on institutions).
This has been the main funding that UKRN has received in the last few years. We are extremely grateful for this support, and what it has allowed us to do to improve the way HEIs work together in the UK. However, it is time-limited and when the projects end the funding ends (or vice versa, if you prefer!). The Open Research Programme has received a no-cost extension to July 2027. At that point, unless we have identified a sustainable path, our capacity to act will be greatly reduced. This is how we started, with minimal funding, and we can do it again, but it will be more difficult given how we have grown – in size, ambition and activity. A working group is currently designing scenarios to sustain funding our future activities; more on that in the near future…
Secondly, other sources of income…
We’d like to use this opportunity to announce that we are setting up a new venture – UKRN Services. The UKRN communities are blessed with some of the leading experts in research rigour, reproducibility, open research, research methods, statistics, epistemic diversity, and meta-research. We have special interest groups on topics that range from arts research, qualitative research, and computational reproducibility. What we have not had, up until now, is an easy way for the UKRN community to offer its expertise to those who would benefit from it, for example through training, mentoring, or consultancy. We have done those things, but the arrangements have been clunky and ad hoc. We are also keen to avoid exacerbating the free labour problem in academia, by paying those that contribute to these activities where we can. We also want to streamline our processes. For all of these reasons, we are setting up a social enterprise, a legal entity that our members can use to deliver fee-based services. We are delighted to say that we have just been awarded £63k from the ESRC to provide staff time to support the development and co-creation of UKRN Services with our community and in consultation with our many collaborators across the sector and internationally. We feel that this is an important vote of confidence in UKRN, and testament to the reputation that the UKRN community have created.
It is unlikely that any surpluses from projects and services will on its own be enough to maintain the support that the UKRN community currently gets from “UKRN Central” (the Executive), which is largely underpinned by staff currently funded on time-limited projects. That will probably mean two things: reducing the size of the Executive, and exploring other funding sources. This will include continuing to apply for project funding (including as partners on joint bids), seeking core funding from UK research funders (where we deliver sector benefit), and asking institutional members for a contribution (where we deliver benefit to those members). We will ensure that any contribution is fair between our institutional members, given their diversity; we are exploring different models with them, acknowledging the sector’s very challenging financial circumstances.
Our current Research England funding runs out in the next year or so, hence the need to develop these plans. Of course, it is a very difficult time to be having these financial discussions with institutions and funders but, being optimistic, if we can develop an approach that works now, it should work whatever the future brings! UKRN firmly believes that research rigour is not simply a ‘nice to have’, and that collaboration is the way to improve it. Let’s see if we can win that argument.
UKRN is its community. We need to hear from you: what you hope to achieve; what UKRN can do to support you doing it; what UKRN can do better. If we can’t support you the way you need it, we will have failed.
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