Changing expectations

Changing expectations is a Royal Society programme that aims to understand how best to steward research culture through a shifting research landscape. Through a national dialogue with the research community, by drawing on the experiences of our past and present, and exploring potential futures, Changing expectations investigates the evolving relationship between the research community and the wider research system.

Changing conversations

• What is research culture? animation outlines the range of topics that fall under research culture and the work the Royal Society has been doing to start conversations about how culture can continue to improve.
• The Where will your career take you? case studies aim to inspire researchers to think differently about what success looks like today and to challenge ideas about what skills and achievements should be valued.
• Throughout 2017 the Royal Society held a series of innovative and thought-provoking Visions of 2035 workshops. These engaged individuals from across the research ecosystem. Participants from across academia, industry and government came together to imagine an ideal research culture of the future, and how this might be achieved, using the Museum of Extraordinary Objects and speculative scenarios.
• Insights from over 20 of these workshops, and other conversations with the research community, have now been published in Research culture: embedding inclusive excellence. This document will be the foundation upon which the Research culture programme continues to be built.
• TEDxWhitehall 2018 brought together over 180 researchers, civil servants, policy makers, and others from 47 individual institutions for a series of talks, performances and videos on the theme of Changing Expectations.
• The Collaboration Collection will be a series of historical and contemporary case studies focused on collaborations and the conditions that led to their success.

Providing tools to support

• Integrity in practice is a series of case studies featuring positive interventions that can be made to improve research culture and integrity. This project was developed in collaboration with the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) and launched at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in September 2018.
• To widen participation in the ongoing national conversation, the materials for running your own Visions of 2035 workshop are now being made open access. Read more about getting involved in our blog post.
• The Society is considering how researchers’ overall contribution to research can be assessed. Resume4Researchers is a tool for showing the full range of an individual’s contributions to excellent research and will be released in early 2019.

Policy activity

• The Royal Society responded to the consultation on REF 2021 restating support for the Stern Review's call for an institutionally-focused REF. This will require a new, more holistic way of assessing research quality, which should be based on the institution’s research environment, evidenced by a portfolio of research outputs from its constituent departments.
• The Royal Society responded to the Science and Technology Committee's inquiry on Research Integrity stating that research integrity was central to research culture and that improvements to research integrity required a whole-culture approach. The Committee's report on Research Integrity included a whole section on the importance of research culture.
• The Royal Society recently published a statement on research integrity, outlining roles and responsibilities of individuals and institutions.