Brave New World: Scholarly Communication After COVID
A fast-track study led by Kudos to understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on research funding policies, university budgets and practices, and researchers' workload, processes and communication / publishing needs.
This project is now complete.
Purpose
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted research, but also acted as a catalyst for change. The scholarly communication sector must respond quickly, meaning publishers, societies and providers of related services need to quickly understand “the new normal” for research funding, communication and dissemination. This critical study will be oriented towards identifying rapidly emerging needs and changes in attitudes and behaviours. It will give publishers, societies and providers of related services the intelligence you need to react quickly and plan effectively – timely insights and recommendations to inform immediate decisions and shape longer-term strategic plans.
Study sponsors
The Brave New World project is a collaboration between the following organizations:
The academic lead on the project is Dr Christopher Daley, Research Development Manager at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Background
COVID-19 has disrupted the research sector on many levels. Researchers have had to juggle research activity with an increase in both teaching and administrative requirements, and home life demands. Experiments and trials have had to be postponed or cancelled, resulting in delays to the flow of research funding. Disruption to undergraduate study is likely to reduce university budgets by at least 10%, and research grants from charitable funders will be adversely affected by falling donations.
On the other hand, public attitudes to research have improved, and governments around the world have been quick to announce increases in research funding. Research in areas related to the virus has accelerated, with thousands of studies published in record time. The costs of attending and travelling to meetings and conferences (estimated at 3% of annual research investment) have been substantially reduced, and the rise in – and success of – virtual events may lead to longer-term re-allocation of this budget to other aspects of research and more effective forms of engagement and communication.
The disruption has provided a window for reconsidering the role, processes and evaluation of research. Rather than “getting back to normal”, many funders and institutions are positioning the pandemic as a catalyst for pivoting their strategies for research and research communication, with resulting rapidly shifting policies and practices.
Implications
A number of organizations in the sector have begun small-scale polling of their customer contacts, exploring everything from copyflow to productivity and work–life balance. Others are looking at longitudinal studies of researcher attitudes and behaviours. The bigger picture – how evolving government, funder and institutional policy is re-shaping authors’ expectations and needs – has yet to emerge. There is also relatively little intelligence available at scale on the immediate and mid-term impact on researchers – the practical challenges they face right now and see themselves having to deal with over the coming 6-12 months and how that will impact their publishing and broader communication behaviours and preferences.
This new project from Kudos will combine desk research, teleinterviews and a survey to provide publishers and providers of related services with insight into the most critical and rapidly emerging changes that funders are driving, and researchers are experiencing, as a result of COVID-19. This will be a practical study that seeks to address relatively short to mid-term needs and opportunities, although with commentary on likely longer-term impacts. In this way, it will become a vital source of market intelligence on how publishers and other service providers can plan for and manage the change happening now, and on the near-term horizon.
Kudos has a track history of working with funders, institutional administrators and individual researchers to gather valuable evidence and synthesize this into clearly defined opportunities and recommendations. Past projects include “Bridging the Divide” (which identified opportunities for publishers, societies and related service providers to help researchers deliver on funders’ expectations relating to broader audiences and impacts) and “Swimming Upstream” (identified opportunities for meeting researchers’ communication needs before the point of publication). The 2016 “Fair Share” project led to the development of the “Shareable PDF”, an innovation that inspired the approach adopted last month by Springer Nature and ResearchGate.
Methodology
- Global, cross-disciplinary surveys of researchers and librarians.
Desk research into funder and institutional policies, processes and budgets.
The findings will be analyzed and interpreted to recommend actions that publishers, societies and providers of related services need to take both now and in the future. Examples might include summarizing new criteria with which researchers need to comply when making publishing / journal choices, or highlighting areas such as virtual events or peer review in which new support services will be needed.
Key topics
- How has COVID-19 already affected funders’ policy and practices?
- How is it affecting policies, practices and budgets for 2021?
- In which areas do libraries expect to have to make cuts?
- What are the day-to-day implications for academics, particularly in relation to their publishing choices / behaviours, their capacity for undertaking e.g. editorial duties and peer review, and their attendance at events?
- What actions do publishers, societies and providers of related services need to take now, and what actions are recommended for the future?
Get involved
- Find out how to Become a sponsor