When research met policy – a perfect match online

Alex Freeman

Alex Freeman, founder of Octopus.ac, explains the platform’s new feature integrating government ‘areas of research interest’

As a society, we rely on government policies achieving their aims. We want them to work – not to waste resources, fail, or worse, have bad unintended consequences. That means they must be based on good evidence to start with and be evaluated as they are implemented. For those two things to happen, government departments and researchers need to be aligned and aware of each other’s work and needs.

There are many ways in which the realms of policy and academia can meet and interact, but there’s no getting away from the fact that their differing needs can make it complicated. Academics’ careers hang on them publishing ‘high impact’ (i.e. widely read and cited) journal articles. Policymakers need real-world evidence, ideally from their own countries, with evaluations undertaken to their timescales. The two often don’t coincide.

Thanks to the research excellence framework (REF), in the UK at least, there is now an incentive for researchers to demonstrate ‘impact’ in the real world. This includes delivering evidence of direct benefits of their work to policymakers. Equally, UK government departments are all now encouraged to publish ‘areas of research interest’ (ARIs) and to connect with researchers whose work relates to them.

Incentivising best research practices

But how would researchers find out about these ARIs? And how would government departments find relevant researchers?

To address this need, scholarly publishing platform Octopus.ac has developed a new feature integrating government ARIs in an easily searchable and interactive new function.

Funded by UKRI, Octopus.ac is designed to help incentivise best research practices, including collaboration. Rather than publishing ‘papers’ on the platform, researchers can publish one of eight publication types (justifying the name Octopus), ranging from a ‘research problem’, through ‘methods’, ‘data’, ‘analyses’ and ‘real world implementation’ and including ‘peer reviews’. By hosting their work on Octopus.ac as one of these modular publications any author can link their outputs to existing work, encouraging faster, freer, and more collaborative working.

Now, ARIs from UK government departments are published on Octopus.ac as ‘research problems’, making it much easier for researchers to identify potential opportunities for collaboration as they browse or search the platform for work relevant to their own areas of interest.

Reciprocally, when a researcher publishes a piece of work linked to a governmental ARI ‘research problem’, they are given the option to pass their contact details on to the relevant department. Even if they choose not to do this, all relevant work can still be easily viewed by the department if it has been linked to the relevant ‘research problem’.

As an example, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport recently posted a ‘research problem’ regarding the impact of smart speakers on radio providers. It outlines the parameters and explains they are particularly interested in evidence useful to their work on sustainability and the funding of the BBC as they prepare for discussions around the broadcaster’s charter renewal in 2028. Any researcher working on, or aware of, evidence that would be of interest could now freely log in to Octopus.ac and publish a linked ‘rationale’.

Collaboration and collection

This ease of functionality allows researchers to quickly and easily provide details of any approach that they think would help address the issue. The collaborative nature of the platform means others could go on to link a ‘method’ describing how the relevant data might be collected and subsequently link a ‘results’ publication including relevant data (or link to data in a repository) collected according to that method etc.

Any number of researchers can link any number of publications into that chain, helping effectively synthesise the evidence and building a rich tapestry of information helpful to the original area of interest. Adding the ARIs to Octopus.ac means more people with more diverse ideas can provide input, allowing for a greater variety of solutions to problems.

There are currently nearly 1,700 ‘research problems’ from UK government departments alone. Many of these are (or will be) linked to UKRI funding programmes, offering a wealth of opportunities for researchers to connect their work and raise awareness from interested policymakers, providing evidence that might be of great value when preparing for the next REF exercise.

Meanwhile, those of us who just rely on government policies to be effective and efficient can be reassured that now there is a higher chance of good quality, relevant research work being brought to the fore of policymakers.

Alex Freeman is founder of Octopus.ac

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