UKRI to review ‘one principal investigator per grant’ rule

The UK’s main research funder may abolish the rule that prevents several research leaders being listed on grant applications, its chief executive has suggested.

Dame Ottoline Leyser, who has led UK Research and Innovation since last summer, told the UK Research Integrity Office’s annual conference that she was considering allowing two or more principal investigators (PIs) per project to help shake off the idea that science was reliant on “lone geniuses” or “Einstein-like boffins”, rather than large research teams encompassing a “portfolio of activities” carried out by technicians, postdoctoral researchers and PhD students.

“I am very interested in why it is, for example, that apparently all our grants have one PI – they have to have one PI. There doesn’t seem to be inherently a reason why that is the case,” explained Dame Ottoline at the event on 19 May.

“We are certainly going to be looking in our programme considering better and simpler funding at how we can build a funding system that genuinely supports all of those things we want to support and [which] emphasises…the portfolio of activities that is needed over and above [just] one individual delivering on all [requirements] and having all the pressure and the glory associated with just them,” said Dame Ottoline.

Her hint at how a new emphasis on team science would “genuinely feed into how we allocate funding” follows the announcement by the UK’s funding bodies that an international advisory body to review research assessment, including the research excellence framework, will be led by New Zealand’s former chief scientist Sir Peter Gluckman.

On this theme, Dame Ottoline said the current system of distributing quality-related research funding, worth about £1.6 billion annually, was also “heavily dependent on individual PIs” rather than research teams or culture more generally.

“How much money you get depends on how many of those people you have on your lists,” said Dame Ottoline.

“Although there was a move following the Stern review to break the link between those individuals and those outputs to allow that more portfolio-based assessment that I think is so important, it failed because we were unable to come up with a way of measuring the volume in universities that was different from those individuals,” she added.

“That we find it so hard to do that shows how deeply embedded in our thinking that individual PI is in how research and innovation happens. We need to find much more holistic research measurements on volume that allow us properly to break that link.”

On the issue of academic bullying, Dame Ottoline said it was “unacceptable that bullying and harassment behaviours are so endemic”, but she argued that it was more important to examine incentives and rewards that created bad behaviour than to seek to punish individual offenders, saying that a “focus on accusatory solutions does not help vulnerable people as it should”.

In her experience, “people who are behaving in these ways do not realise [their behaviour] is inappropriate” and the “bullied person does not want to shop their supervisor into a blame system”.

“They recognise their supervisor is in a difficult situation and may have positive motives, but they have dumped their anxieties on them,” said Dame Ottoline, who insisted that the focus should be on “stopping these behaviours with governance solutions”.

“High-quality governance and reporting procedures are needed, but hopefully things should very rarely get to this point,” she said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com