5.B To what extent are UK researchers engaged in “best with best” science-driven international interactions?
Summary Findings:
Active engagement in international scientific collaborations
Substantial pay-off from infrastructure investments, but future maintenance and running costs are a challenge
5.B.1 What is the nature and extent of engagement between the UK, and Europe, USA, China, India and Japan?
Many research groups in the UK are attractive partners for international scientific collaborations and they themselves are actively engaged in this. This is evidenced by their participation in many European research networks and has resulted in a significant fraction of publications with authors from outside of the UK. Although these interactions are particularly well-developed with Europe, promising new actions are currently being undertaken to expand this to Asia and North-America. The UK is seen as an attractive venue by chemists around the globe. Prominent scientists have and continue to come to the top universities in the UK as visiting professors and on longer term sabbaticals, supported by a multitude of enabling schemes from the Research Councils, the Royal Society and various charities.
5.B.2 How effective is the engagement between the UK and the rest of the world?
Throughout the UK, major investments have been made in buildings and large equipment during the last decade. Given the present impressive infrastructure, it is to be expected that the international interactions will further expand in the future. It will be a major challenge, however, to guarantee continued efficient operation of the state-of-the-art equipment in the shared facilities within the new laboratories.
Recommendation
B.1: Strategic planning is needed and mechanisms need to be put in place to maintain, upgrade and, eventually, renew the equipment in the years to come. In addition, qualified technical support personnel are needed to run the facilities, to provide long-term continuity and to train the PhD students and post-doctoral scientists, who constitute the primary user base.
International interactions strongly depend on the exchange of young scientists. The newly established DTCs offer a sufficient critical mass in selected research areas to interact with research schools outside of the UK. Moreover, it is appreciated that travel funds are explicitly provided for this to the DTCs.
Recommendation
B.2: Provision to support international exchange, as appropriate, should be made available to PhD students funded through other means than DTCs, for example DTAs.
The improvement of the international competitiveness of UK science, relative to 2002, is evidenced by its ability to attract a number of well-established scientists from overseas to permanent positions which either strengthened existing research lines or established new ones.
5.B.3 Are there particular issues for the chemistry research area? What could be done to improve international interactions?
Although individual links were apparent, the Panel received little evidence for significant interactions with the USA and India. This is perhaps not surprising because the emphasis continues to be centred on the EU and to some extent China. The Panel understands that collaborative research initiatives have already begun to address the issue of global reach for UK science in general.
5.C What evidence is there to support the existence of a creative and adventurous research base and portfolio?
Summary Findings:
Risk-averse research culture with penalty for failure too high
Funding policies do not encourage sufficient transformative research
5.C.1 Is the current balance between high-risk/high-return research and "safe research" appropriate?
Transformative research typically refers to research that has significant novelty in either its objectives or its methods. It often combines more traditional ideas in new ways, and it can have great ambition in tackling very hard problems. Two universal features characterise such research. First, it is high-risk. Transformative research proposals by their nature will require researchers to make leaps that can seem challenging, perhaps impossible. The second feature, only apparent after its completion (sometimes years after), is that it is of high impact often on multiple disciplines. Thus, publications describing transformative research often have very high citation rates and effectively ‘spawn’ new sub-disciplines and lines of inquiry.
Using this definition, overall UK chemistry research is not universally characterised by a risk-taking (adventurous) research culture. As a result, the Panel did not see many examples of truly transformative research at an international level. The Panel notes that UK chemistry research is characterised by high quality and rigor, but it is perhaps not adventurous enough. The level of risk-taking was low and, although notable exceptions do exist (often in areas of growth since the last Review) there were few examples seen of real breakthroughs in Chemistry.
5.C.2 What are the barriers to more ‘adventurous research’ and how can they be overcome?
Transformative research necessarily involves risk, and researchers and their research culture, funding agencies and government must accept this reality. Current funding levels and implementation mechanisms are a significant barrier to adventurous research. The Panel found that investigators were writing too many short-term “safe” grant proposals with understandably narrow goals and consequently that they had little time for discretionary “high-risk/high-return” blue sky work.
Recommendation
C.1 Increase the number of long-term single PI initiated grants to stimulate more adventurous research. If these grants are processed via responsive mode there should be a cap to ensure a sufficient number of grants can be awarded. Importantly, such grants should not be in competition with very large grants.
The short PhD training duration is a second barrier to creating a culture of pursuing adventurous research as its focus tends to be largely time-based as opposed to achievement-based. Moreover, the short duration encourages ‘play it safe’ and makes challenging transformative research that much more difficult to pursue.
Several panel members expressed the opinion that the short PhD training period coupled with a typical short post-doc period of two years does not well support the development of truly independent investigators with the clarity of vision and direction to launch their independent research careers as junior lecturers, or even 5-year research fellows. Indeed, the duration of training to independent status seems to be roughly 2-4 years shorter than international norms in Chemistry. Researchers are seemingly forced to develop too quickly and thus are trained to develop risk-averse behaviour.
5.C.3. To what extent does Research Council funding policy support/enable adventurous research?
This is an area in which funding policies could have a substantial effect on research culture. First, transformative research programmes by their nature are not ‘directed’ and are likely to arise most frequently in the responsive mode. Research Councils should look to these programmes as the crucibles for these types of activities. Next, because of the high-risk associated with such grants it is probably necessary to create separate reviews and separate criteria for such efforts. Examples of this in the US include NSF and NIH responsive mode programmes designed for high-risk, high-payoff research and exploratory research grant mechanisms that send these types of proposals for separate review. Perhaps, longer duration PhDs may be required for such activities. Moreover, it is probably also generally true that a longer funding period will help Chemistry researchers take more risk in their research. Nevertheless, the Panel found many examples of high creativity and innovation in areas ranging from synthesis to supramolecular chemistry, with notable instrument development, environmental and geochemistry, plus stellar examples in materials plus remarkable chemical biology and theory. There were also stunningly successful examples of spinouts derived from adventurous work.
Recommendation
C.2. The Panel suggests a need for stakeholders to examine with the chemistry community how best to improve the effectiveness of responsive mode grants in enabling more adventurous research’.
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