Enabler 1:
People & Research Culture
Purpose
To cultivate an inclusive, vibrant research culture that enables excellence across all roles, career stages, and disciplines, grounded in integrity, openness, and responsible evaluation.
Purpose
We will cultivate a vibrant, inclusive research culture that values and enables excellence from every contributor – student or staff, across all roles, career stages, and disciplines. Our culture integrates research and education as mutually enriching endeavours driven by curiosity, discovery, and a commitment to making a difference.
We champion open research, research integrity, and responsible evaluation, creating an environment where all researchers can pursue excellence and thrive through embedded support, communication, and collaboration.
Priority Activities
Inclusively Working Together
1. We foster an inclusive and cohesive research community where diverse contributions are valued, and there is a strong sense of belonging and shared purpose by: Convening a Research Culture Forum to create a community of practice and inform the development of institutional priorities for a positive research culture that delivers excellent research performance.
2. Ensuring recognition, career development, and visibility for all research team members.
3. Embedding equality, diversity, and inclusion into all research policies and practices through targeted action plans, encompassing all job families and across our research environment.
Career Development and Wellbeing
We promote mental health and wellbeing as the foundation of a dynamic culture, where curiosity, innovation, and continuous learning drive excellence and personal growth, empowering everyone to thrive and advance by supporting:
1. Early-Career and Postgraduate Researchers with dedicated leadership and strategic planning and delivery – including through our Doctoral College Strategy and Early Career Researcher Strategy – and accessible pathways towards research and wider careers, including research leadership capabilities.
2. Mid-Career Researchers with targeted training to develop their teams, and career development opportunities to consolidate and build on their research achievements.
3. All Colleagues with research-related training, development opportunities through our international networks, and action plans for the Researcher Development Concordat. Inclusive AI literacy and skills are developed across all career stages and roles, with tailored training in ethics, critical evaluation, and practical application.
4. Comprehensive Wellbeing grounded in a commitment to physical, mental, and emotional safety, supported by a culture of care, collaboration, and mutual support. A strong sense of belonging is fostered through connected communities that enable shared purpose and collective growth.
Responsible Research
Everyone shares a responsibility for maintaining robust research practices, and we uphold the highest standards of integrity and encourage constructive scrutiny by supporting:
1. Open Research across the entire research lifecycle.
2. Research Integrity through mandatory training, guidance, and mentoring, with governance and policies aligned with the Concordat, e.g. responsible metrics approaches and our own approaches to inclusive, responsive and socially grounded AI research. Clear pathways for AI-enabling roles, accessible routes to AI expertise, and responsible use of AI tools strengthen research integrity while reducing administrative burden.
3. Reproducible Research to openly share protocols, methods, and research data, and encouraging reproducibility within disciplines.
Assessment and Recognition
We are committed to assessment and recognition systems that value and motivate a full range of contributions and celebrate shared success by:
1. Embedding our research culture in institutional assessment (e.g., REF2029), guided by departmental plans and reviews.
2. Promoting responsible assessment by delivering on our commitments to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and embedding our responsible metrics guiding principles.
3. Implementing initiatives for fair recognition, including researcher-led activities and appropriate attribution for all contributors.