From hyper-competition to strategic leadership
The role of funders and research institutions in 21st-century science
By Ludo Waltman, André Brasil, Kathleen Gregory (RoRI/CWTS), Stephen Pinfield (RoRI/University of Sheffield) and Peter Kolarz (RoRI)
“It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964 … Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.” (Peter Higgs)
The above quotation from Nobel laureate Peter Higgs reflects a widely felt frustration within the research community about excessive competition. Researchers complain they spend far too much time writing applications for grant funding, a large proportion of which are ultimately rejected. They complain about intense competition for a limited number of positions at universities. And they complain about the pressure to publish in top journals – journals that are extremely selective and that reject a lot of high-quality research for publication. As we discuss in RoRI’s Future of Peer Review report that we just published, these complaints are rooted in persistent problems around competition across the research system. They raise deep questions about the organisation of the system and the roles of different actors in the system.
The pressures of a hyper-competitive system
Research funders go to great lengths to organise the competition for funding as fairly and as efficiently as possible, for example by experimenting with new mechanisms such as partial randomisation and distributed peer review. However, due to the ever-increasing number of applications, combined with a limited pool of reviewers, it is increasingly difficult for funders to keep the funding system running, however hard they try to operate as efficient, streamlined competition managers. Recent developments in AI make it much easier for researchers to produce applications, further increasing the pressure on funders.
Universities and other research institutions find themselves in an equally difficult position. Their own financial resources for research are often limited. To carry out ambitious research projects and offer their researchers attractive career opportunities, they put a lot of effort into supporting researchers in the competition for grant funding. However, no matter how much effort institutions put in, the total amount of money funders have available won’t increase, and ultimately the zero-sum dynamics around grant funding will result in few winners and many losers.
Even more importantly, the relationship between institutions and their researchers has become increasingly instrumental. Instead of close-knit communities of collaborating researchers with shared values and goals, institutions have increasingly become competition machines primarily concerned with maximising their researchers’ success in the competition for grant funding. While this is a rational way for institutions to respond to incentives created by funding systems and assessment regimes, it reduces the capacity of institutions to act as true intellectual communities with their own missions, priorities, and responsibilities. Researchers also behave in an increasingly opportunistic way towards their institution, focusing primarily on how they can best capitalise on their institution to survive in the competition for grant funding and academic positions.
A better organisation of the research system
Is there a better way to organise the research system? We explored this question in the RoRI PEER REVIEW project. The project began with the observation that peer review processes within the research system are structurally overburdened. This applies both to peer review of grant applications and to peer review of research articles and other outputs. There are many experiments with innovative new approaches to peer review, but despite the value of these experiments, they don’t seem to offer a fundamental answer to the problems peer review is facing.
In our project, we also tried to find ways to improve how peer review operates. Interviews with experts yielded all sorts of interesting suggestions for improvements, but experts tended to limit themselves to the domain of the research system they knew best – for example, either the funding domain or the publishing domain, but not both. Within a domain, experts mainly proposed relatively modest incremental improvements.
As our project progressed, we increasingly came to realise that incremental improvements in specific domains in the research system won’t resolve the problems around peer review. What is needed is a systemic perspective that considers the research system as a whole: How are the different domains in the system interrelated, and what interventions can help to address the system-level problems we are encountering?
Our key insight is that problems around peer review cannot truly be resolved within the current hyper-competitive organisation of the research system. The research system needs a better balance between competition and collaboration. This requires a critical reflection on the roles played by the various actors in the system, in particular funders and research institutions, but also journals and publication infrastructure providers.
Our report outlines the overall direction in which we believe the research system needs to move, while recognising the need for further discussion on the specifics, including for example the dependence on national and disciplinary contexts.
Strategic leadership
Over the past decades, both funders and research institutions have evolved into organisations focused on operating as efficiently and as effectively as possible within a research system organised largely around competition for grant funding. To achieve a better balance between competition and collaboration, we propose that funders and institutions transform themselves from competition managers and competition machines into strategic leaders in the research system. This requires a shift from a model of constant competition among individual researchers towards strategic forms of competition and collaboration at the level of institutions.
In our vision, research institutions, both individually and in partnerships, need to develop clear strategic profiles, for example around the major scientific and societal challenges of the 21st century and the basic and applied research needed to address these challenges. Funders should allocate financial resources to institutions based on the extent to which institutions have strategic profiles that convincingly address the needs of science and society. Institutions then have a high degree of autonomy in how they spend the funds allocated to them. They can, for example, use these funds to recruit researchers without those researchers having to secure funding themselves. In this way, institutions can form communities of researchers who collaborate on the basis of shared strategic goals.
In our proposal, both funders and research institutions are expected to operate at a more strategic level than they do at present. Institutions should engage in strategic partnerships, particularly where they have complementary profiles. At the same time, they would also compete with each other for strategic funding. Funders evolve into strategic system shapers. They should develop a deep understanding of the needs of science and society, as well as the strategic capabilities of institutions. Based on this, they would allocate financial resources to institutions in a way that optimally aligns scientific and societal needs with the strategic capabilities of institutions.
Trust markers, peer engagement, and evidence syntheses
The publishing domain of the research system also needs to move towards a better balance between competition and collaboration. Traditional peer review of research articles is part of a system in which researchers compete to publish in prestigious journals. In our report, we argue for a transition from peer review to peer engagement. Unlike peer review, peer engagement is based on researchers’ natural interest in each other’s work, promoting a more collaborative rather than competitive dynamic between researchers.
In line with similar suggestions made by others, we envision a layered approach to quality assurance, recognising that different research outputs need different forms and levels of scrutiny, depending on their purpose and use. Certain elementary aspects of research quality can be signalled through trust markers, providing evidence that an output meets basic quality standards, such as ethical approval or data availability. On top of this, peer engagement offers more in-depth forms of quality assurance. We also propose that funders invest more in evidence syntheses. Evidence syntheses, carried out collaboratively by researchers with diverse types of expertise, enable the research system to make scientific knowledge of the highest possible quality available to society, particularly in areas where society has a great need for such knowledge. Together, trust markers, peer engagement, and evidence syntheses offer a new, more collaborative approach to quality assurance.
Ready for the 21st century
Competition can spur individuals and organisations to perform better, but the intense pressure on peer review reflects a hyper-competition that is unhealthy and unsustainable for all actors in the research system. There are no simple solutions, but we hope that our report will contribute to a more fundamental discussion about the roles of different actors in the system. Without funders and research institutions taking on strategic leadership roles, it is hard to imagine a research system that is truly ready to tackle the major questions and challenges of the 21st century.