The COVID-19 pandemic has seen increased collaboration in the research community while concerns about funding for overall research projects persist, according to Elsevier.
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen increased collaboration in the research community while concerns about funding for overall research projects persist, according to a newly released survey by Elsevier.
In a follow-up to Elsevier’s 2019 Research Futures report, 63% of researchers say they have increased collaboration during the pandemic which includes working across disciplines more often.
While there is optimism about improvements in how research is being conducted, there is pessimism regarding financial support according to the new Research Futures 2.0 report.
Fifty percent of researchers say they are underfunded due to money being diverted to battle COVID-19.
“The impact of COVID-19 has affected R&D funding through changes in funders’ priorities and financial constraints on funding due to impact of the pandemic on countries’ economies,” the report stated. “Less than a quarter of researchers think they have sufficient funds, 6 percentage points less than in 2020.”
There is hope that funding for research will improve.
Forty-one percent of researchers in the survey are optimistic that there will be increased funding due to closer cooperation between the corporate world and the science community.
The pandemic has also pushed the research community to improve and expand cooperation among their groups with 63 percent of respondents saying they are working across disciplines more often in their collaboration.
“Nearly half of the researchers expect one of the lasting impacts of the pandemic will be more Open Science over the next 2 - 5 years,” the report said.
Sixty-seven percent say they now consider scientific manuscript preprints a valuable source of information (compared to 43 percent before the pandemic). But there are concerns about these research documents not going through the peer review process.
Some scientists, however, are being proactive in helping with peer reviews.
“We have also seen prominent scientists leverage social media platforms, particularly Twitter, to provide informal peer review; they use it to ‘publicly share concerns about poor quality COVID-19 preprints or amplify high-quality preprints,’ the report continued. “A survey of bioRxiv users found that more than 40 percent of authors had received feedback on their preprint through social media.”
The need for speeding up research is increasing the use of technology with 16 percent of respondents saying they are extensively using AI on their projects.
Communication with society has also improved with 64 percent of researchers believing the public has a better understanding of their work. Fifty-four percent say that there will be a greater emphasis on the societal impact of what they do going forward.
“A growing need to demonstrate the (societal) impact of research will reflect a broader climate of greater accountability; this work will fall to researchers, who will need support to deliver effectively,” the report said.
The survey solicited 100,000 people in the research community of which 1,173 in 2020 (+/- 2.4% margin of error) and 1,066 in 2021 (+/- 2.5% margin of error), participated.
