Photo by Banff
Sunshine Village on Unsplash
With the 2022 Winter Olympics just concluded, I am reminded that recently, the International Olympic Committee changed the historic Olympic motto to recognise the unifying power of sport and the importance of solidarity. The change added the word “together", and the new motto now reads “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together".
The realisation that together scientists can do more and better science was at the root of the vision of Prof. Phil Burke in the early 1970s, when he came up with the concept of the Collaborative Computational Projects, or CCPs. The key concept of the CCPs is to share knowledge and expertise, encapsulating it into software that is developed and maintained by the community, with CoSeC's help, for the benefit of all scientists in each field. The High End Computing Consortia were inspired by the same philosophy and have proven a very effective vehicle for putting the power of High Performance Computing at the service of science. This coming together to share knowledge and software was a major step change that has enabled UK computational science and engineering to punch well above its weight for decades.
In the 21st century we have an opportunity to get much more science out of our labs and universities, by sharing data all the way along the research process: from the design and plan phase to publication, and beyond. A crucial step forward is to improve data management practices across the research lifecycle. This improvement is going to be a further demand on what is already a very pressurised work life for researchers, so it needs to be fuelled by a powerful purpose. The purpose should come from the realisation that our longest-lived contribution to science is through enabling the scientific community as a whole to build on what we do. The word “enable" is key here. The evolution of the research culture must be towards a situation where every researcher is valued and recognised for enabling the collective of scientists contribute to the body of knowledge. And the enabling role should not be seen as being subservient but a more noble achievement than the Nobel Prize.
I believe that the Nobel Prize, by singling out only a few individuals, perpetuates the individualistic view of the scientist that has dominated since the invention of the “lone genius" during the Renaissance. The practice of only surfacing some of the data and only at the publication stage has kept researchers trapped in this view. When we only surface the publication, we leave behind any hope of reproducibility. Regrettably, we also thwart the chance for more researchers to help all our efforts achieve wider impact. Finally, we hamper fair recognition for those people who have helped with our work, for example the people who write and maintain research software. The Society of Research Software Engineering and the Software Sustainability Institute have done a lot to raise the profile of those who write and maintain the software used for research, and I believe that it will be only when we will surface the entire research process that we will achieve fair recognition for the collective that enabled the work. I also believe that sharing data more widely will create a move towards a “we're in this together" research culture which will attract more people who are naturally inclusive, thereby addressing the urgent need to increase diversity and inclusion in STEM. The UKRI 101 jobs that change the world campaign stems from the same idea.
Of course, I have not mentioned all the Digital Research Infrastructure investments required to achieve this – I will leave that for a future blog entry. I think it is all doable if we have a strong enough purpose. The purpose is that by recognising the full contribution of researchers, not just for the papers they publish but as enablers of more and better research by the collective, we can transform research culture to be one where we extract value from the whole research process, where everyone's contribution is recognised equitably, and where those who are motivated by achieving not only high, but also wide, impact will feel included. For all of this to happen, we need to surface the data all along the research process. It will be a journey with bumps and falls, like we have seen at the Winter Olympics, but with enough momentum, we will make research faster, higher, stronger – together.
