A new way to follow the research trail

by Balviar Notay

Good quality research is in high demand, as researchers look for useful collaborators, research managers seek to develop commercial partnerships, and funders try to demonstrate that they have invested well. That should be good for the UK’s universities, whose researchers perform well on the world stage in terms of both the quality and the quantity of their outputs—so it is frustrating that research outputs remain so hard to find.

In fact, searching for research has been so tricky up until now that the UK still can’t put an accurate figure on the numbers of research outputs its universities produce, or even say (with any certainty) who has funded them.

All this means that people are struggling to access all the research that is out there and universities are severely restricted when they need to demonstrate the impact of their research outputs. Researchers, universities and funders all stand to gain if we can find a way to make it easier to track the UK’s research outputs and attribute them accurately to funding streams.

The streets are paved with gold? Open access is coming to town

by Neil Jacobs

It is probably fair to say that we are in the midst of one of the biggest shake-ups of research communication for 300 years and the UK is at the centre of many of these changes. On 1 April, the revised Research Councils UK open access policy and guidance comes into force and there is a revision to the Wellcome Trust policy being implemented on the same day. What’s more, on 25 February, the Higher Education Funding Council for England released a call for advice on OA and the next Research Excellence Framework exercise.

Universities are taking on new roles in communicating research and may, in time, lose an old role. The new roles are in managing payments on behalf of their researchers when they publish in OA journals and, in the light of the recent HEFCE letter, potentially in curating research outputs using their repositories.

The internet has challenged many industries and communities, empowering some and threatening others, and the same is true in communicating research.  Many argue that there are remarkable opportunities for research and innovation in the internet age and OA is a condition for realising those. The UK Government response to the 2012 report by British sociologist, Dame Janet Finch and subsequent responses from major research funders, all confirm that they understand those opportunities and the role of OA in realising them. But the transition will be long and, given acknowledged differences in interests between some of the major players, might be bumpy in places.

The British Pharmacological Society champions its science

by Humphrey Rang

From Research Fortnight, 13 March 2013.

The learned society representing pharmacologists supports sound science and medicine, and works constructively at the interface of research, industry and government, writes Humphrey Rang.

Contrary to recent conjecture, the British Pharmacological Society has championed high-quality science to improve the discovery and use of drugs for treating disease.

At the BPS we value courage and passion in our membership and partners, and acknowledge the invaluable work achieved by additional voices in urging action on important issues such as clinical trial transparency. We welcome the contributions of individuals or smaller organisations such as Sense about Science, which the BPS supports with regular donations.

Righting wrongs, though, involves more than shouting from the sidelines. We value our active participation in partnerships and are proud to be a founder member of the Ethical Standards in Healthcare and Life Sciences Group, which targets increased transparency and accountability in collaborations with industry, for the benefit of patients.

Our 3,000-strong membership covers a broad spectrum: from internationally recognised research scientists and teachers of basic and clinical pharmacology, to members based in industry or regulatory and advisory bodies. It respects and values what the BPS stands for—honesty and reason are evident in our peer-reviewed journals, meetings, and educational and outreach work.

Despite some conflicting agendas, our diverse and growing membership gives the society a unique ability to bridge different groups. Even critics of the BPS cannot dispute the importance of working constructively at those groups’ interfaces.

For example, although a young group, the ESHLSG already has 19 member organisations, including many royal colleges and learned societies. Guidance on collaboration between healthcare professionals and the pharmaceutical industry was not produced by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry [RF 27/2/13, p21] but was the first publication of the ESHLSG. It is already under review, with a revised edition due this year.

Expertise in drug discovery and development, where the UK has traditionally excelled, is at risk due to recent industry cutbacks. The BPS was co-organiser of a meeting of 20 learned societies, with input from industry representatives, to discuss this problem. From it emerged the Drug Discovery Pathway Group, involving the BPS, Society of Biology, Academy of Medical Sciences, Royal Society of Chemistry and Biochemical Society. This group is engaging with government, industry and academia to find ways to minimise erosion of high-level expertise that will be essential in the future.

Last issue’s article implied that the BPS has acted undemocratically. An objective eye would recognise that the BPS Council, like that of many learned societies, is elected and mandated to take action on behalf of members without consultation, and has represented pharmacology at the interfaces between our profession, government and industry. The council has been a driving force in the society’s work, publishing a five-year strategy that prioritised safe and effective prescribing among other goals.

Where reform is needed, the society acts. The BPS gave its support to the All Trials campaign promptly, on 20 February, as soon as the council had seen and approved the proposal. Many significant organisations have been much slower off the mark. And our commitment to reducing harm to patients is evident from the leadership of BPS clinical pharmacologists, funded by the society, in building a Prescribing Skills Assessment for medical students in collaboration with the Medical Schools Council. Backed by online teaching modules, the PSA is currently being piloted.

The BPS has been accused of silence on homeopathy, yet its response to a consultation by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency in 2005 was clear: “Despite many years of investigation, we have no convincing scientific evidence that homeopathic remedies work any better than placebo. Pharmacologists have noted frequently that most homeopathic products are diluted to the extent that they contain no molecule of active ingredient, that is, no medicine, which is highly misleading to consumers who are unlikely to recognise the expression ‘30C’ for example. Furthermore, there are serious concerns...that officially endorsed use of such remedies may put patients at risk of delayed diagnosis.”

To avoid any doubt, the BPS’s position is that there is no scientific basis for homeopathy. Homeopathy represents a failure to recognise the importance of evidence as a guide to making choices. It is the voice of science, not just pharmacology, that needs to be heard. The society’s collaborations with its sister societies and other scientific disciplines can only help when it comes to addressing this and similar failures of understanding.

Humphrey Rang is emeritus professor of pharmacology at University College London and president-elect of the British Pharmacological Society.

Pharmacology society does little to defend its subject

by David Colquhoun

From Research Fortnight, 27 February 2013.

The organisation that represents British pharmacologists has remained largely silent over the problems of both big pharma and alternative medicine. It’s time for that to change, says David Colquhoun.

Over the past few years a courageous group of writers, researchers and activists has worked to expose the truth about the medicines we are sold, be they conventional or alternative.

Thanks, above all, to Ben Goldacre’s books and articles, more people than ever know that the big drug companies have been concealing evidence of the harm their products do, or the good they fail to do. On the other hand, thanks to a small army of bloggers, the preposterous claims made by peddlers of quack remedies are less likely to go unchallenged.

Big pharma is in trouble. Many of its products have been revealed to provide only marginal benefits, and some things that seemed useful, such as SSRI antidepressants, have been shown to be next to useless once hidden trials were revealed. Roche continues to conceal the full data on Tamiflu. And industrial money has corrupted university research, with companies withholding data from collaborators in academia, and putting researchers’ names on ghostwritten papers that they have not seen.

Between 2009 and 2012, fines of at least $10 billion were imposed on some of the most eminent companies, including Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck and Abbott. The biggest single fine of all, $3bn, imposed in July 2012, went to a British company, GlaxoSmithKline.

And yet, the organisation that represents pharmacologists in this country, the British Pharmacological Society, has remained silent throughout.

In fact, last year the BPS, without consulting its members, signed an agreement with the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry on collaboration between healthcare professionals and the pharmaceutical industry. Much of the medical establishment also signed. Two of this document’s most objectionable clauses are that “Industry plays a valid and important role in the provision of medical education” and “Medical representatives can be a useful resource for healthcare professionals”.

It is naive to think that industry personnel can teach clinical pharmacology without bias in favour of their own company’s products. Such clinical “education” has long been part of pharma’s marketing strategy; most of the doctors I know and respect refuse to see reps altogether. The BPS has many members who teach pharmacology—are they really so inadequate?

At least some of the pharmaceutical industry’s products work. But pharmacologists should also be concerned about the quackery industry, worth about one tenth of the pharmaceutical industry at $60bn a year. Virtually none of its products work.

You would think that the BPS would take a view on the claims made for medicines, but apparently not. For almost a decade, it has maintained a near-total silence on problems such as the labelling of homeopathic and herbal remedies and the teaching of alternative medicine in universities.

Perhaps this is not surprising, given the equally supine nature of the government agency that oversees the pharmaceutical industry, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. Rather than being merely useless, the MHRA has been actively unhelpful. It has allowed misleading labels to be put on herbal potions, and nodded through surreal labels on homeopathic treatments that give advice on what to do in case of an overdose. It has stood by while pharmacists sell homeopathic ‘vaccines’ for whooping cough and meningitis. If children die of meningitis after buying such quackery, the MHRA should be held responsible.

It’s difficult to see what makes the BPS so reluctant to speak out against the MHRA. But members of the MHRA’s senior staff are BPS members and the society’s president, Philip Routledge, is a past chairman of the MHRA Herbal Medicines Advisory Committee.

Negotiating the relationship between science, industry and government requires skill. But that is no excuse for the BPS’s collusion in failures of both honesty and reason.

The BPS must show that it is on the side of the whistleblower. It should speak in favour of academics and industry collaborating on drug development, but make it clear that industry must have no say in how, or whether, results are published. And it must get behind AllTrials, the campaign for transparency in the reporting of clinical trial data.*

I have been a member of the BPS all my working life. I now find myself asking if I can remain a member of an organisation that has done so little to defend honest scientific behaviour.

Correction

*The print version of this piece stated that the British Pharmacological Society had not signed the AllTrials petition. In fact, the society signed on 20 February 2013.

David Colquhoun is professor of pharmacology at University College London. A version of this article with references appears on his blog.

In the 13 March edition of Research Fortnight, Humphrey Rang, president elect of the British Pharmacological Society, responds to this article. 

Theresa May and Tim Montgomerie show David Willetts' ideas are becoming the new normal for Conservatives

by William Cullerne Bown

Whether she ever gets to be Prime Minister or not, Theresa May's speech on Sunday deserves to be remembered.

For 30 years, economic orthodoxy in the Conservative party has been in thrall to the convictions of Margaret Thatcher. But Sunday looks likely to be remembered as the day the party finally moved on. If so, Conservatives will have David Willetts to thank for it.

For more than a year, Willetts has waged an intellectual and political campaign to slaughter the muddled yet sacred cows of the 1980s such as "no picking winners". It has taken courage, for at the beginning he understandably feared a backlash from the right of his party. Thanks to grammar schools, he knows how pitilessly any mis-step may be punished. But the backlash has not materialised and Sunday was the day his argument for an industrial strategy went mainstream within his party. For May did not simply name-check the Willetts' approach. The Home Secretary made it a central plank of her vision for Britain. 

This is what May actually said:

"In the longer term, we need to build on the work the Chancellor has already done through local enterprise partnerships and enterprise zones, as well as the efforts of David Willetts in the Business Department, and expand our nascent industrial strategy. Now, before you think I’m about to reach for the beer and sandwiches, I’m not talking about failed seventies-style corporatism. Nor am I talking about a different type of big government. I’m talking about a more strategic role for the state in our economy. Let me give a few examples of what government could do.

First, it should map out the established and developing industries that are of strategic value to our economy, so policy can be designed to promote those industries. We effectively do this on an ad hoc basis in trade negotiations and when we make tax changes – mostly for the financial services industry – but we should do it on a wider and more systematic basis, working with our best businesses in key sectors. That’s how we’ll improve our record in infrastructure, skills and training, and research and development.

Second, and building on this work, government should identify the training and skills capabilities we need, and tailor its policies accordingly. It could encourage the establishment of more technical schools. It could work with schools and business to get more young people studying science, technology, engineering and maths. It could fund deep discounts in tuition fees for students who want to study degrees like engineering, where we have a shortage of skilled workers. This kind of planning already takes place in the immigration system, with a shortage occupation list in key sectors, so I don’t see why we shouldn’t apply the same logic to our own workforce.

Third, government should identify geographical clusters of industry – like biotech in Cambridge, the semiconductor industry in the South West of England, or the Formula One corridor in Oxford, Warwick and Birmingham – so we can help develop these clusters further, put British businesses at the forefront of industrial innovation, and create thousands of new jobs.

Fourth, government should change its approach to public procurement, so we can strike a better balance between short-term value for the taxpayer and long-term benefits to the economy. I don’t mean we should always award contracts to British companies, regardless of price or quality, but we could produce a clear framework that explicitly takes into account the effect of procurement on British jobs, skills and the long-term capacity of our economy.

And fifth, we should pursue a relentless campaign to support entrepreneurs and wealth creators. This might mean traditional solutions, like granting generous tax exemptions for start-up businesses. But imagine if, as our public service reforms develop, we broke down the artificial divide between private and public sectors and allowed hundreds or even thousands of organisations to provide public services. Not only would we be improving those services, we’d set free world-beating British education and health providers who could use their expertise to win business in foreign markets. As George Freeman, who’s done a lot of thinking in this area, says, “we need a recovery that allows us to unlock the full enterprise potential of the best of our public sector.”

To those who say this is wrong, this is about picking winners, I say it’s no such thing. It’s about the state taking a strategic role, deploying our funds and resources in the wisest possible way. It’s about doing everything we can to get Britain trading its way out of trouble and towards prosperity."

This is not just endorsement of an interesting idea. It is commitment. And in May, Willetts' cause has found an articulate communicator. There is something about her no-nonsense way that cuts through the abstractness of the issues. She manages to make this sort of policy sound exactly like what it actually is - plain common sense.

On Monday, Tim Montgomerie, the influential founder of the ConservativeHome website, welcomed May's speech in his Times column, endorsing also the need for an industrial strategy.

Further battles lie ahead. It is still for David Cameron and George Osborne to decide whether they are prepared to match the vision of an industrial strategy with the corresponding resources. Can they imagine, for example, giving the Technology Strategy Board anything like the budget it would command in comparable economies, a good £1 billion a year or more? But for now we can reflect on a momentous Sunday. The economic debate in Britain is unlikely ever to be the same again.

Hacking for health

by Andy South

From Research Fortnight

At 8.45am, there was a flurry of emails—extension cables were in short supply. Then, messages of reassurance, saying that people were buying them from hardware shops on the Cowley Road. By 9.15am, on schedule, everyone was ready to go. So began the third NHS Hack Day and Andy South was there.

Over the weekend of 26 and 27 January, about 150 “geeks who love the NHS”, in the words of the event’s logo, assembled in a hall the size of two badminton courts at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

We were drawn by the prospect of a free lunch, hot drinks, and the opportunity to make contacts, use our skills and build something useful.

Our mission, to quote event organiser Carl Reynolds, a doctor at the Royal Brompton Hospital and co-founder of Open Health Care UK, was to make health IT less bad. The hack day, also known as a hackathon, aimed to achieve this by producing open-source software against the clock, bringing the nimbleness of personal IT into the notoriously leaden-footed corporate sphere. In the UK, the Field Studies Council and Met Office are among those who have also held hack days.

In his welcoming address in Oxford, Muir Gray, former chief knowledge officer of the NHS and director of the Oxford Centre for Healthcare Transformation, encouraged us to act like an ant colony—to self organise, and make progress where top-down approaches have failed. There was no mention of licensing or IP—these will be important later, but this event was about getting ideas off the ground quickly.

Participants came from diverse backgrounds, including the health professions, academia, health-related small businesses and a London bank. Those with ideas for projects gave two-minute presentations—no Powerpoint allowed—and the rest of us were free to offer our services. There were 18 pitches in total, covering subjects including dementia, conflict of interest, the professional development of clinicians, mapping prescription data, and using video conferencing for patient consultations.

I joined a project to develop a simple model of the spread of infections across England, pitched by Chris Martin, a coding-savvy GP from Essex. We were joined by Rob Aldridge, a public health doctor at University College London. After discussing our previous experience, and a brief period of planning—although I’m not sure a project manager would have recognised it as such—we got to it, with Chris working on an infection model, Rob on data sources and me on maps and a user interface, which are my particular interests.

Later we became a quartet when Barry Rowlingson, a statistician and mapping guru from Lancaster University, joined our group.

Teams had until noon on Sunday to submit a project for the final presentations and judging. Following discussion with my team-mates, I put together a submission for my part, which had become a simple web application allowing users to plot their own data onto a map showing the boundaries of the Clinical Commissioning Groups, the GP consortia that, from April, will commission local health services in England.

Along with 17 other teams, we scraped under the deadline and then had three further hours to get the software working and prepare a presentation. It was a bit like the Great British Bake-off, with the judges—including Tom Steinberg, director of @mySociety, the writer, researcher and activist Ben Goldacre, and senior NHS data people—sauntering over to inspect our progress as we stared at laptop screens rather than oven doors.

Following a three-minute presentation by each group and a short judges’ conclave, each of the eight judges chose a category winner. The overall first prize of Oxford mugs and a small tin to keep ideas in went to OpenHeart, an application that allows surgeons to record their procedures by dragging and dropping icons on to a digital picture of a heart. This is much quicker than scribbling in pencil, and the data are immediately useable for future analyses and the patient’s records. A version for eye surgery, OpenEyes, is already in use at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.

Other winners—us included—joined a scrum for hack-day t-shirts and programming books. Further NHS Hack Days are planned later this year in London, Cambridge and Edinburgh; I propose to attend one or more.

Thanks to our efforts in Oxford, at least 18 software tools with the potential to improve NHS IT are in development. Geraint Lewis, chief data officer of the NHS in England, who attended the event for the first time, tweeted the following day that his back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested the event generated at least £100,000 of value. Not a bad return on the £3,000 the NHS commissioning board provided towards the catering.

Photo courtesy of Barry Rowlingson.

UCL to set up science policy department

by Miriam Frankel

Miriam Frankel

University College London is to set up a department of science, technology and engineering policy in September this year.

Research Fortnight understands that the plans were prompted by a bid by researchers at the University of Sussex’s science and technology policy research unit SPRU to transfer en masse to UCL. However, after months of negotiations UCL decided to set up its own department rather than taking on the unit and its core faculty of around 30 wholesale.

Anthony Finkelstein, UCL’s dean of engineering, says the initial plan for the department is to hire up to 20 academics at all levels, with “significant recruitments” this year and next, and with further hires in each of the next five years.

“We may be approaching particular individuals across the UK, but we will also be openly advertising,” says Finkelstein. “Clearly there are many excellent people at Sussex, as there are at some other universities.”

Finkelstein says the department is expected to have a total budget of about £5 million per year and will absorb UCL’s existing Centre for Engineering Policy, led by Brian Collins, former chief scientific adviser to the Department for Transport and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It is not yet clear whether other UCL academics will also transfer, but the university has confirmed that the existing Department of Science and Technology Studies will remain an independent unit.

Finkelstein says the department will have a “broad global remit and provide access to specialist material from across UCL”. Plans include setting up a course aimed at policy professionals, including civil servants. “We will be looking carefully at innovative initiatives such as the fellowships at the Centre for Science and Policy Studies [in Cambridge],” he adds.

The group is also expected to work closely with other UCL departments. “We will develop a significant teaching activity and we will also have an interdisciplinary research institute which spreads out beyond the department,” adds Finkelstein.

The department will open just a month before the census date for the Research Excellence Framework, meaning UCL can capitalise on the past work of any research star it draws in to the new department. But, insists Finkelstein, “it’s not just about the REF”. For example, he says, not all staff will be hired in time for the exercise. In addition, having a brand new department could make it difficult to produce case studies to contribute to the impact component of the REF, which looks at past work and will count for 20 per cent of the assessment.  

Instead, he argues, the move into science policy is natural for a university such as UCL, which has “world-class science and engineering…and a full disciplinarily spectrum”.

“We are in the centre of London, close to the focal point for…the civil service, the government, the media and the judiciary. So we are where policy is made,” he says.

In addition, he says, there is a “change-the-world ethos” deeply engrained in “UCL’s DNA”. “That requires people who are able to translate between policy and the underlying science.”

Wrapping ideas and spectacle into the perfect Christmas present

by Peter Wothers

From Research Fortnight

A few years ago, I demonstrated the science behind buoyancy by attaching helium-filled balloons to a teenage girl and floating her off Alexandra Palace in north London. “It was boring,” she said, on returning to earth. “All we did was fly.”

Kids, eh? In the age of Harry Potter and the Xbox, it can be hard to thrill with mere reality. And yet the world’s increasingly synthetic nature has also created an appetite for unmediated experience—think of how attendance at live music has boomed as record sales have collapsed.

This is a hunger that educators of all stripes should be tapping into. When done well, there’s an immediacy and directness about a lecture that makes it the perfect vehicle for kindling insight.

That’s particularly true of my science, chemistry, because no other discipline is so suited to live performance. MRI images and telescope pictures are amazing, but there’s a machine between the viewer and the thing. There’s nothing like a chemical reaction for linking a scientific concept to a physical phenomenon.

In the spring, I learned that I was on the shortlist to give the Royal Institution’s Christmas Lectures. Ever since, my mind’s been whirring, thinking about the ideas I want to communicate, and the demonstrations that will convey them.

The RI asked me to prepare a proposal on the subject of the elements. It seemed a disappointingly stale topic. But the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. People know about the elements, but they often misunderstand them—this was a chance to really educate.

Given that I only had three lectures, I went back to the Greek idea of the elements, devoting one to each of earth, air and water. That left no room for a talk devoted to fire, but pyromaniacs can rest easy: no lecture will lack for combustion.

I also had to do a screen test. I decided to show how water expands when it turns to steam—the transformation that powered the industrial revolution and still generates most of our electricity. I used a transparent piston made of silica, which is heated to 300°C so that when you add a millilitre of water it evaporates more or less instantly.

It’s a beautiful thing and it must have done the trick, because in June I learned that I’d got the job. Since then, I’ve been throwing ideas at the RI and the BBC, who will screen the lectures. They have helped winnow the material and shape it into a narrative, while I’ve occasionally had to point out that the amazing thing somone saw on YouTube is not actually chemically feasible.

As of the last week of November, I’ve been in rehearsals full time, building and testing the demonstrations ahead of the first lecture on 11 December. On the day, there’ll be some capacity for retakes, but to pretend nothing ever went wrong wouldn’t be true to the science—and besides, audiences rather like a mishap.

There’s an art to creating a demonstration that entertains and amazes but also makes a point. It takes a long time to design and build the equipment—that silica piston took years, and eight or ten prototypes, to get right. But beyond that, it’s taken me years to understand how to package the idea inside the spectacle, so that it seems obvious. At its best, it’s almost as if the audience hasn’t realised that it’s learned something.

Chemistry, of course, is the science most closely associated with the RI. We’ll be nodding to the past—to the work of Humphry Davy, for example, who showed that sodium and chlorine were elements.

But if you thought that chemistry demonstrations hadn’t moved on since your schoolteacher lit up a magnesium ribbon, think again. We’ll be trying things that have never been filmed before. The Christmas Lectures are big shoes for any chemist to try to fill, but I think Faraday himself would be impressed by some of what we’ve got planned. We might even prompt a jaded teenager or two to raise an eyebrow.

The web has given the lecture new life. By fuelling the rise of geek culture, it’s made it more fashionable to be interested in ideas. And it’s shown there’s a huge audience for watching people talk about them, as illustrated by TED talks and by the RI Channel.

I’m fantastically lucky that these days, the Christmas Lectures give their presenter the best of all worlds—the chance to engage with a live audience, the chance to reach a mass audience on TV, and the chance to be viewed at any time by anyone with an internet connection. Now all that I need is for the equipment to work.

The Christmas lectures will be broadcast on BBC4 at 8pm on 26, 27 and 28 December. Photo: Paul Wilkinson

Citizen or scientist? It might not matter anymore

by Kate Jones

From Research Fortnight.

One of my favourite photos shows a van adrift in the middle of a Mongolian river. The unfortunate occupants, who came to no harm, were volunteers recording ultrasonic bat sounds for my research on bat populations.

This project, called iBats, began more than six years ago, when I scaled-up traditional bat-monitoring methods so that anyone could, with some hi-tech gadgetry, use them. At the time, most volunteers on science projects needed a good initial knowledge base, and so tended to be interested amateurs. Poor scientific design had given some citizen science projects a bad name among academics.

Today, all that has changed. Thanks to the increasing ubiquity of smartphones and tablets, the past 18 months have seen an extraordinary growth in applications that take images, sounds, and other recordings to feed into research projects. Social media and gaming are rapidly changing who can take part in science, and how they can participate. My Mongolian picture’s most recent outing was a fortnight ago at the Zoological Society of London, at a symposium entitled Smarter Science: The power of the crowd, which highlighted the boom in both the quantity and variety of citizen science.

Some projects use citizens as sensors. If your phone has the WideNoise app, you can use it to collect data for University College London’s map of noise pollution. If you’ve also got the London School of Economics and Politics’ Mappiness app, you can then record how that affects your wellbeing. The iBats app gathers ultrasonic sounds with the help of a special microphone.

Other projects use citizens as thinkers, to categorise data that is too difficult for a computer to process. At Zooniverse.org, there are opportunities to help make sense of everything from telescope images in astronomy, to whale calls, to ancient texts; over 700,000 people have joined in. Darwin Tunes allows participants to steer the cultural evolution of music, while fold.it lets them grapple with the complexities of protein folding.

More radical approaches blur the distinction between citizen and scientist. For example, in 2010 the respected international journal Biology Letters published a study on bumblebee vision coordinated by researchers at UCL and designed, carried out and written up by a class of primary school children in Devon.

The number of do-it-yourself scientists is also growing, as the skills to programme smartphones spread and amateurs begin designing their own hardware using customisable computers such as Raspberry Pi, which is the size of a credit card and costs about $30. I haven’t seen a cheap ultrasonic microphone for a Raspberry Pi yet, but I would bet that one is months not years away.

Projects can mobilise and organise the public with astonishing speed to provide data on topical issues. The development, by researchers at the University of East Anglia, of the Ashtag app to monitor ash dieback is a recent example. Governments are waking up to the importance of citizen science too, perhaps seeing it as a good deal in a climate of austerity—a guide (pdf) published by the UK Environmental Observation Framework last week highlights the approach’s quality and cost-effectiveness.

Although researchers’ perception of the value of citizen science has changed radically in the last six years, challenges remain. Such projects put scientists in unfamiliar territory: they have to generate, train and build capacity in users, while providing feedback and rewards, and designing a study that is feasible, scalable, and interesting enough to be published. With this in mind, I often collaborate with organisations experienced in engaging and retaining volunteers.

The growth of citizen science raises other issues. The proliferation of projects might mean that scientists have to compete for public attention, efforts may be duplicated, data standards may not be agreed, and projects might be developed without consideration of users or politics. The recent development of citizen science platforms, such as Zooiniverse or iNaturalist, which have common data standards and suites of projects or tools might ameliorate these issues.

Crowd-collected data also pose new analytical and visualisation challenges. Projects such as the ZSL’s Instant Wild, which shows images from automatic cameras, collect more data than they can analyse. Designing ways to recognise biodiversity images and sounds automatically is an exciting challenge.

The democratisation of research continues apace and I hope that eventually anyone will be able to ask and answer questions about their world. Just as it is becoming increasingly meaningless to distinguish between online society and the physical world, so in another six years, citizen science might be just science.

Beyond Lowlands: academics alone should not set the agenda for research

by Tom Wakeford

To researchers who have started working in UK academia during the last two decades, the caricatures painted by Sir Keith Thomas and his colleagues in their launch statements for the Council for the Defence of British Universities this week must seem a little antiquated. To give them some historical context, I’d like to recommend them a Christmas stocking-filler: the DVD box set of the BBC series A Very Peculiar Practice.

Seeing CDBU’s statements through the eyes of those at the fictional Lowland University depicted in the series, will make it easier for newcomers to understand the context for their views – campuses that were still stuck firmly in the ideological trenches that pitted the ivory towers versus the free-market.

The quirky BBC comedy drama, written by Andrew Davies and broadcast in 1986, portrays confrontations between academics defending their belief in an scholarly independence unfettered by government directives, and a vice-chancellor hell bent on adopting a business model.

For those of us who remember the struggles that engulfed almost all UK campuses in the 1980s - with the partial exception of Oxbridge - Lowlands reminds us that that Conservative-led governments always carry with them the threat of a complete privatisation of universities. The CDBU has rightly criticised our senior university managers, who have a habit of unquestioningly accepting each new Ministerial whim, while valuing relationships with private corporations more than those with their most eminent scholars and scientists.

Lowland’s fictional researchers stood largely aloof from the concerns of the rest of society. Like Thomas and his colleagues, they would have believed academics alone are ‘best qualified to determine the direction that intellectual enquiry should take’. But  the environment in which academics work today has fundamentally different dimensions than those that the CDBU appears to perceive.

The CDBU’s argument that academic freedom should be free from political or commercial interference ignores the revolution taking place on campuses in the UK and around the world. Academic researchers, supported by a variety of government and charitable funders, are allowing the knowledge and expertise that exists outside the university-industry nexus to co-determine their research agendas. These additional perspectives include the experience and understandings of expert patients, farmers, lay epidemiologists, amateur naturalists and young carers. Strategies for a dialogue with those people in society whose expertise comes through their experience, rather than formal training, are now beginning to be being incorporated in research and knowledge exchange programmes funded by the Research Councils and other HE funding bodies.

Though inevitably patchy in their results, the recent Beacons for Public Engagement pilots and Research Catalysts schemes are already demonstrating the potential for dialogue with civil society to shape UK academic research in ways that improve its accuracy and societal benefit. Co-designing research with people who exist outside the academic or commercial realm dates from the ‘action research’ movement of the 1970s.  Participatory plant breeding, in which farmers guide researchers in how to formulate research questions that lead to improved agricultural livelihoods, has been influencing mainstream agronomic research for twenty years. The UK’s Alzheimer’s Society’s Quality Research in Dementia Network, which involves dementia patients and their carers in designing medical research is over ten years old.

Some academics may find the very notion of valuing the knowledge of people who they see as their intellectual inferiors hard to grasp. At the height of the GM food controversy in 1998, Richard Dawkins - a founding member of CDBU - suggested that the only views to be taken seriously on a scientific topic should be those expressed by people who had at least the equivalent of an A-level in a statistically based subject, such as maths or economics. Fourteen years and many international studies later, it is clear that it has been smallholder farmers and others whose analysis is grounded in grassroots understandings of agricultural systems who have developed the most accurate comprehension of the complexities of the issue.

In public health, academics using traditional methods of studying prevention programmes for HIV/AIDS have often struggled to generate usable evidence about young people’s sexual behaviour. Dutch researcher Miranda van Reeuwijk has responded by co-designing a research programme with young people in Tanzania. They have become her co-researchers, producing ground-breaking insights that could allow future interventions to succeed. In addressing issues of global climate change, engagement with indigenous people’s complex understandings of their environment are now seen as being a vital complement to the perspectives provided by traditional approaches to science.

Alongside the purely profit-driven forms of academic entrepreneurialism identified by the CDBU, UK Research Council funding schemes are now encouraging researchers to think more imaginatively how such contributions can be made. Earlier this year, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council adopted a strategy for public engagement, promising a new collaborative model in which citizens engaged in co-operative inquiry with researchers. And far from abandoning its duties to the public, as some recent coverage has implied, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) recently announced a new initiative under its Conncected Communities programme to support research teams who collaborate with civil society groups in ‘co-creation and co-design processes’.

Last month, members of the AHRC Peer Review College discussed how it might improve the quality of research and knowledge exchange that is supported through the Council’s funding process. Some College members believe that the current format of grant applications – dating from the pre-participatory era – should be re-designed to address the Research Council’s desire for dialogue with non-academic communities to be at the heart of grant proposals.

Seventeen billion pounds of public funds will spent on academic institutions this year. However much the CDBU may wish to return to a previous era, we now live in a resource-constrained society where such levels of resources can only be morally justified if build on the basis of a two-way conversation with society about the direction of research agendas. Its call for a ‘reflective enquiry’ could be useful, as long as it begins with a set of assumptions that are better informed than the ones they seem to have adopted so far.

In A Very Peculiar Practice, the hilarious Vice-Chancellor Jack Daniels and his Americans in dark glasses brought ‘co-production money’ to the Lowlands campus from sinister military-industrial corporations. The CDBU need to look beyond Lowlands-era stereotypes and see the more complex, and in some ways more hopeful, scenario in universities today. In the week in which the government’s chief ecologists invited the public to enrol as citizen scientists in order to help save Britain’s 80 million ash trees, the CDBU should be welcoming a fundamental strengthening of the reliability of knowledge through genuine co-production.

Instead of clinging to the pre-democratic scholastic ideals, Professors Thomas, Dawkins and Dame Byatt should support the wide range of organisations, from NESTA to the UCU, who support researchers having a more equal dialogue our fellow citizens. If they put their weight behind such a collaborative approach to setting research priorities, they would provide universities with more ethical and intellectually robust justification for their substantial budget, while bolstering their ability to remain independent from the agendas of private corporations.

 

Tom Wakeford, is a member of Peer Review Colleges of both the ESRC and AHRC. On November 29 is launching a new course, Community Participation in Professional Practice, at the University of Edinburgh.