People in UK institutions are investing a lot of time, attention and, especially perhaps with support from Research England, money into enhancing research culture. There are several reasons why UKRN sees this as both important and highly relevant to our mission. For example, a positive research culture allows researchers and professional staff to do their best work, it promotes both collaboration and healthy competition, and it enables diverse perspectives to be included into research on an equitable basis – and we know that leads to better research.
While great work is going on within individual institutions, there is an opportunity to make even more of these investments if people are aware of, and able to learn from and collaborate with, similar projects in other institutions. Last year, UKRN brought together over 50 institutions to share some of these lessons, and now we are releasing a catalogue of over 250 individual projects from those institutions who agreed to share information in this way. We hope that this one-off catalogue fulfils an immediate need, ahead of the setting up of more ambitious initiatives such as the UKRI Good Practice Exchange.
Catriona Firth of Research England welcomed the release of the catalogue, saying “It is great to see the breadth of projects and initiatives that are emerging as a result of Research England’s Enhancing Research Culture funding. The new resource from the UK Reproducibility Network, developed using funds from the University of Bristol’s ‘enhancing research culture’ allocation, will add value to the sector’s work by enabling those involved to see where and how they might benefit from closer interactions with related work elsewhere.” You can read more here