Universities, funders and governments need to get a grip on bullying and harassment.Credit: Getty
What to do if your country has a serious problem with bullying and harassment in academic research? The UK is among the countries with such a problem, as its largest public funding body, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), acknowledged in an evidence review published in 2019 (see go.nature.com/48mehd9).
The future of universities
The answer should not be that research culture is not important enough to qualify for assessment in formal measures of university research excellence. However, this is how many interpret the government’s decision, three months ago, to halt UKRI’s plans to assess the quality of research culture as part of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), a periodic assessment of the performance of universities.
Whether the government should have the power to directly intervene in how research is evaluated is itself highly questionable. However, the current REF team is not alone in this predicament; Governments around the world are increasingly interfering in decisions that would normally be the prerogative of researchers.
The REF team must have the courage to hold the line. This will not be easy, and the team must be supported by researchers. Any decision should not jeopardize efforts already underway to identify and address misconduct in research.
REF is a competitive star rating system for measuring excellence, ranging from four stars (world-leading quality) to one star (nationally recognized for being original, significant and rigorous). This exercise is carried out every seven or eight years, and the results are of great importance to institutions, because they are used to distribute around £2 billion (US$2.6 billion) a year in funding.
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Historically, the research framework of reference has measured three things: the quality of output (such as journal articles and studies); Quality of the research environment (including facilities and research revenues); And the impact of the research on society, the environment or the economy.
In the past, UK policymakers have taken pride in the fact that the country “punches above its weight” in terms of international measures such as share of publications and number of Nobel Prizes. The UK’s 40-year periodic research assessments next year are seen as one of the drivers of this distinction. But the R&D framework has also created a hierarchical infrastructure at universities that values performance indicators such as grant income and publication metrics, and rewards some types of research over others, along with competition for collaboration. Some researchers have suggested that this Infrastructure is a factor in encouraging a culture of bullying – which happens when people with power abuse it Undermining, humiliating or causing harm to another person.
After significant consultation with the UK research community and And take advice from international expertsthe REF team announced in January that the composition of the REF rating system would be changed to include measures of research culture, underscoring the idea that excellent research benefits from a supportive and collegial work environment. The international consultants proposed giving equal weight to outputs, impact and the expanded category of “people, culture and environment”, which would replace the previous research environment category. However, the REF team settled on weights of 50%, 25%, and 25%, respectively.
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Researchers were invited to submit ideas for new indicators to show that people are valued and that the institution has a supportive and collaborative research culture. These indicators could include data on the gender pay gap or promotions, or show how institutions are meeting the requirements of external initiatives such as the Declaration on Research Evaluation and the Alliance for the Advancement of Research Evaluation. Earlier this year, universities also had the opportunity to participate in a pilot project to explore the use of these indicators.
However, the changes were shelved by Science Minister Patrick Vallance in September. Although stopping is It is scheduled to be uploaded next weekThe experimental results have not been published yet. Researchers are preparing to hear news that the importance of research culture is being reduced. Some have said nature They fear that the word “culture” could be removed from the main title of an assessment framework, even if the supporting elements of culture remain in the components being measured. This would send all the wrong signals, suggesting that UK authorities are downplaying the importance of research culture at a time when universities need to talk about how to better deal with bad behaviour.
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The main problem is that although harassment is against the law in the UK, workplace bullying is not. In universities, complaints are dealt with mainly through internal grievance processes, and data on such cases are difficult to obtain because the involvement of external bodies such as regulatory bodies is relatively little. As a result, in the past decade, organizations have been created to support people who experience harassment in academia, including G21 and G21. Academic Parity Movement. They demand more external scrutiny of what is happening at universities.
Big change sometimes results from small steps. Integrating a supportive research culture into the research framework of reference is one such step. Bullying and harassment are serious problems, and excellence in research and a supportive environment are not mutually exclusive. The UK authorities should do everything they can to support both.