With a bit of philanthropic funding the metascience programme gets real

Back in November the government said that “A step-change is needed in how the government works with philanthropy to make the most of opportunities to secure support for UK strategic RDI capabilities and opportunities,” as part of its response to the Nurse review.

Usually, we would not cover research funding announcements but UKRI’s Metascience Grants Programme which promises to fund “cutting-edge research into more effective ways of conducting and supporting research and development” is not only an interesting fund but it tells us something about the research landscape more generally.

This particular grant comes as part of the government’s wider commitments to enhance metascience research, research into the research process itself, wherein they promised £10m toward answering what works in making bold discoveries, incentivising replicable research, and understanding how technology and AI may impact scientists’ jobs.

The project is funded by the usual range of research councils but intriguingly it is not only funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology but also by an organisation called Open Philanthropy. This appears to be their first involvement in co-funding with UKRI but this isn’t Open Philanthropy’s first involvement in funding UK university research.

Open Philanthropy state their mission is to “help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. So far, we’ve concentrated on selecting focus areas in two broad categories: Global Health and Wellbeing and Global Catastrophic Risks.” Open Philanthropy has also appeared in the news over in America for its backing of organisations in the US shaping AI policy and in the UK for its reported links to the Effective Altruism movement and work to influence AI policy.

It is a step toward the government’s aim to leverage more private funding and it raises a wider policy question on whether the involvement of private collaborators is about only co-funding programmes, shaping future programmes, or shaping university activity more generally through funding. None of this is unusual for funders and this programme could be the first in a more expansive approach to funding research partnerships.

The actual programme has a broad scope.

There is a maximum funding pot of £300,000 per project to cover talent development, training and skills, entrepreneurship, funding allocations, methods of peer review, distribution of funds, institutional structures, open data, reproducibility and integrity, dissemination, understanding impact, and the effect of AI and research on the research and innovation ecosystem.

This fits within the premise of the Nurse review which was explicit that the government should not try and pick and choose policy winners and instead look at the underpinning funding ecosystem.

The purpose of the programme is to gather evidence on what works but in a complex ecosystem realising those benefits will take time. Of course, the design of this programme is also constrained by existing ways of working and methods. Albeit getting into the weeds of the design for meta-funding programmes would make this a meta-meta research programme, which could end up in a blog of potentially infinite length.

The deadline for applications is 4.00pm on 16 July 2024