The decisions the Academy makes need to be as fair and transparent as possible. This is true whether we’re looking at awarding research funding, visas, awards and prizes, or who is elected as a Fellow. The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is an initiative centred around the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated, and we’re delighted to announce that the Academy is now a signatory of this fantastic initiative.
DORA is not a new initiative, and so this may appear to have taken us longer than other organisations, but there’s reason behind our careful journey. We made changes to our research programmes to ensure they were explicitly aligned with the principles of DORA throughout 2020 and 2021 - this has included examining and updating the guidance we provide for applicants and reviewers, as well as the language we use throughout application processes. More detail on these changes can be found in the Academy’s statement on DORA.
Alongside this we’ve been busy working behind the scenes to explore the application of the principles of DORA wherever research is being used as part of assessment processes across all Academy activities. This has included prizes, nominations and selection to Fellowship, as well as review panels for visas. We’re pleased that the vast majority of changes we have made have been in order to be more explicit about what we’re looking for from applicants, rather than remedying things that explicitly go against the principles of DORA. We have chosen to apply the principles in this broad way because the different parts of the Academy’s activities are linked – it is an R&D system after all - and we think we should do all we can to try and prevent perverse incentives that have crept into parts of the research system from trickling into other areas.
We wanted to be certain we’d left no stone unturned before publicly announcing these changes, and spent time exploring our internal processes, raising awareness at a staff level, and talking to other organisations to figure out how to do this most effectively.
The Academy strongly believes in valuing the true impact of the incredible work people do, and hopes that these changes will help play a part in driving positive changes to research culture, as well as helping improve the flow of individuals between academia, industry and other sectors. We recognise that this is a constantly evolving process, and as with anything based around cultural change there is the need for an ongoing, conscious effort. We have, and will, continue to carefully monitor the changes we’ve made and the impacts they might have within and beyond our processes. For research programmes there are some specific things we’re already keeping an eye on; one such example is considering trickle-down implications related to applicants’ institutions, particularly where the Academy imposes a cap on the numbers of applicants from each institution for certain schemes.
We welcome and encourage feedback and comments on any of our processes and how we conduct our activities, and are constantly looking for ways we can improve even further. We’re now focused on exploring the narrative CV format for our research programmes, and having conversations about what ‘excellence’ in engineering should mean rather than what structural quirks of our R&D system influence it to mean.