How do research cultures develop and what makes a successful research culture?

This Policy Workshop, in partnership with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) will bring together researchers from the arts, humanities and social sciences with policy professionals from the research councils, learned societies and Whitehall.

Recently, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ report on The Culture of Scientific Research in the UK argued that open access and collaboration have helped enhance the quality of science, however, it also reported that researchers are concerned about issues such as well-being, publishing practices, competition and research governance and integrity.

Aims of the workshop

The aims of this workshop are to explore contributions from a range of disciplines to recent debates about research cultures. The discussion aims to be inclusive of a variety of periods and approaches, beyond the standard story of the development of science in the post-war period. The scope of the workshop will span research across all disciplines and will include consideration of research in industry, government and the third sector as well as in universities and institutes.

Outcomes of the workshop

The workshop will include suggestions for future research agendas to contribute to a better understanding of research cultures, promoting a richer evidence-base for the development of research policy interventions, and to contribute insights for the design of the next Research Excellence Framework (REF).

Topics will include

• Competition and collaboration
• Well-being and work-life balance
• Pressures to overclaim and fraud
• Gender and research cultures
• Interdisciplinary research
• Career progression and early-career researchers

Policy Workshops