The Research Culture Commons – a community conversation

By Dr Rachel Herries, Research Culture Manager, and Dr Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture and Researcher Development

At the University of Glasgow we are having (and have had) many conversations in which we talk about Research Culture as the collective result of the way we think and feel and act, the choices we make and the way we behave towards each other, within our research institutions. It is also a product of how we engage and interact with others in our global research fields, interpersonally, or through the research discoveries and outputs we produce. Our Research Culture is therefore strongly driven by the way we define, support, evaluate, and reward success in research, and who we give recognition to, as having contributed to that success. Through 2023, and continuing into 2024 and beyond, we have been doing a lot of planning around how to engage our research community in discussions about all of these interweaving topics.

Enhancing our research culture on a practical level, means that in addition to producing outstanding research outputs, we are taking a conscious focus on the way research is done. Since 2019 we have been working with five research culture priorities – Career Development, Collegiality, Open Research, Research Integrity, and Research Recognition – to help us focus our energies on specific target areas. The culture priorities feed into and are aligned with the University’s Research Strategy (prioritising Collaboration, Creativity and Careers) and this alignment is essential to enable us to work collectively to meet the ambitions of the university – which is to carry out excellent research.

Our intentions for Research Culture

We are working with different groups across our research community to express our research culture priorities as statements of intention. We are also working across different projects and programmes to understand what these intentions look like in practice, how we can support them, what resources they need to succeed, where there are small adjustments we can make to enable them, and where we need to invest in creating change on a larger scale.

Career Development

• By creating a culture in which people thrive, we support all colleagues to advance in their chosen career path.
• We work with career destination data, careers experts, reward and recognition specialists, and the employers of researchers to develop a compressive framework of career support.

Collegiality

• Creating an environment in which colleagues actively work together to enable each other to succeed and feel safe and supported is the foundation of our research culture ambitions.
• We value those who demonstrate their respect for their colleagues, and have conscious care for how they lead, interact, communicate and collaborate.

Open Research

• We are supporting transparency, openness, verification, and reproducibility by facilitating early and open sharing of research data, software, code, methods, preprints, open educational resources and materials with a wide range of audiences.
• We place value on a wide range of different research output types across the whole lifecycle of research – improving value to the public as well as to other researchers.

Research Integrity

• We are committed to ensuring that research is conducted to the highest standards of academic rigour to increase the quality of, and trust in, the research record.
• We maintain comprehensive framework of policies, procedures, and resources to support the training, practice, reporting and resolution of issues in research integrity.

Research Recognition

• We seek to develop and embed clear and fair approaches to evaluating research quality, and we share our views in sector conversations on the measurement of research excellence.
• We subscribe to established sector frameworks that recognise and value different contributions and contributors to our research endeavours.

One of the ways in which we are monitoring our success in achieving the intentions above, is in how well we engage different people and groups in the research community.  Ultimately our goal is to make positive change to researchers and research communities lived experiences. Supporting colleagues to feel valued, recognised and celebrated begins with them feeling clear and informed about what we are working towards and why, feeling like the culture agenda resonates with them and their everyday experiences, and feeling like they have the time and opportunities to work with us.

For this to happen there are steps we need to take as a collective to make ways to have new (and sometimes difficult) conversations, to build trust and maintain a collaborative approach, and to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to be involved.

We have established the Research Culture Commons for precisely this reason.

The Research Culture Commons is a network which all members of the research ecosystem at the University of Glasgow are invited to join. Our collective ~6500-member research community is an incredibly rich resource. Collectively we can offer guidance, opportunities, ideas, skills, tools, resources, allyship, a career conversation, or simple reassurance and support – within our community there is compassion, knowledge, creativity and ambition. And these attributes are what can fuel and support individuals to thrive within their research culture. The Culture Commons provides physical and online space to:

• Connect to others for conversations about research culture.
• Share ideas, insights and resources to help us to confidently fulfil our role.
• Devise solutions to the challenges that we face and support others.

• Celebrate the excellent practices and people within our culture.
• Stay appraised of any policy changes, or strategic updates.
• Find opportunities, resources and information we can share more widely, with our Schools, Colleges and global disciplinary communities.

All members of the research ecosystem can contribute positively to culture change, and small contributions all add up to a greater whole when we work towards shared goals.

Oh, the conversations we’ll have

The Research Culture Commons is co-led by a team of ‘Culture Commons Co-leads’, and we have recruited 90+ colleagues from across different disciplines, specialisms, roles, and services at UofG. We have asked our Co-leads to contribute to the building of a thriving community, raise awareness of the Research Culture priorities, and act as advocates for the Research Culture Commons and to encourage members to engage with the opportunities it offers. They play an essential role in ensuring the culture agenda reaches all parts of the research ecosystem, bringing the local perspective to the table and bringing many voices to the conversation.

It’s early days, but we are now starting to engage the community through our online site. We will also be taking the Research Culture Commons on the road through 2024 and have set ourselves the big aim of visiting every one of our 24 Schools at the University of Glasgow, and also of setting out our literal stall in every single building. The conversations are going to be brilliant. We look forward to sharing our progress as this initiative grows.