Efforts to apply metascience to research funding must put evidence and scientists front and centre.Credit: Alamy
The European Research Council made headlines last month when the news broke that those applying for one of its core grants had only a 5% chance of success. Partly as a result of applicants using artificial intelligence, the ratio of submissions to grants at the European Union’s premier science funder is now so skewed as to be little more than a lottery. Some funders are already using lotteries to select grant recipients, viewing these as a fairer way to allocate funding.
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This is not a coincidence. The idea of distributing certain types of grant randomly has been tested experimentally over a number of years. It’s one example of how the field of metascience — the study of the practice of science itself — is having a real-world impact.
Metascience is not new. The world’s oldest journal devoted to the study of science, Nauka Polska, based in Poland, was founded in 1918 and is still publishing. Nature frequently reports on metascience, invites researchers to share their opinions and publishes primary science in the field. A set of studies released in April, for example, investigated the reproducibility, replicability and robustness of research in the social and behavioural sciences1–4. Developments in research funding, research organization, communication and evaluation are all aspects of metascience.
Metascience is also used by governments to support policy and funding decisions. In the past few years, a number of governments have established and funded metascience research units, as detailed in Seize the Meta Moment, a review by an international group of researchers and policymakers that was published last week by the Research on Research Institute in London (see go.nature.com/4z7pdt1). The author list includes members of some of these government-funded metascience units.
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In one sense, this is positive, an example of policymakers seeking solutions informed by research. But the review’s authors point out that political attention also introduces risks — namely that the discipline could be misused to serve government agendas or to justify decisions that are not supported by a consensus of the evidence. They acknowledge that metascience will, to some extent, always be political, but that this should be acknowledged. And they urge politicians to use metascience as a learning tool and a source of evidence, but not as a means of controlling researchers.
In the United States, the Office of Science and Technology Policy has tasked all federal science agencies with establishing metascience capabilities. This was outlined in a July report, Science: A New Golden Age, which criticized excessive bureaucracy and slowness in US science, and embraced the idea of accelerating grant-awarding processes (see go.nature.com/3uj6pf5). One concern is that the US administration could use metascience to push through major changes, such as funding cuts, support for higher-risk research or the adoption of AI, without engaging the broader scientific community.
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The United States is not the only country where researchers are worried about potential metascience misuse; concerns have also been raised in the United Kingdom, the first country to establish a government metascience unit. Last year, the nation’s main public funder of social science, the Economic and Social Research Council, announced a commitment to promoting economic growth. This is part of a broader economic push by the nation’s main public funder, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), in response to a government priority.
The extent to which publicly funded science contributes to growth and the mechanisms underlying it are well-studied questions in the social sciences, and there are a range of views both supporting and critiquing the UK government’s objectives. It’s important that funders such as UKRI do not align themselves with just one view, and that the metascience unit does not reduce measurement of grant recipients’ performance to a metric that is itself still a matter of debate in the research community.
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Most of the world’s science funding agencies were established when research careers were accessible to relatively few people. There is now a much larger and more mobile pool of researchers due, in part, to the expansion of universities and the globalization of science. Funding agencies need to change how they work to adapt as the world changes. That includes addressing the problem of falling success rates resulting from the greater demand for grants.
By far the best way for policymakers to use metascience to inform funding decisions is for them to work with researchers to create and implement tools designed to measure quality and competitiveness, and — as in science itself — to learn from experimentation and experience.
