How will COVID-19 affect research collaboration?

David Bogle | 09 September 2020
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A key question for research universities is how the coronavirus pandemic will affect research and international collaboration in the future. How well has virtual communication worked and how will the expected financial stringency affect us?

The Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California (UC), Berkeley recently organised a virtual seminar focusing on the effects of COVID-19 to explore this. There were four senior United States university leaders and myself, from the United Kingdom. The session was moderated by Margaret Heisel, senior research associate at the centre.

Jim Hyatt, now senior research associate at the UC Berkeley centre, has had an extensive career in senior executive university roles. He highlighted the likely impact of the recession which will inevitably follow the pandemic.

We can learn lessons from the 2007-08 recession where private universities generally recovered more quickly than public universities by using low interest rates to invest, he said. Since then, the costs of major research projects have grown significantly, leading to more efforts involving national and international consortia, such as the Giant Magellan Telescope programme.

This provides a model for tackling major research challenges which are typically too expensive for one university. Such consortia require a combination of sources of financial support, be they universities, governments or philanthropists, as well as other partners who can contribute both financial support and technical expertise and there must be a core organisation.

Given modern communication technology, this model could work on an international scale, according to Hyatt.

Early-career researchers

France Córdova has recently finished her six-year term as the 14th director of the National Science Foundation and is an astrophysicist. She told us that a recent American Institute of Physics report discussed the significant impact COVID-19 is having on early-career researchers.

Hiring has been curtailed, laboratory and fieldwork has been interrupted, infrastructure delayed and, of course, the flow of international students is much reduced, all of which will affect the ability of a nation to increase its skilled workforce, she said.

It has particularly exacerbated the disadvantages faced by under-represented minorities.

She catalogued what she said were very significant financial effects on universities, but also on smaller start-ups, with investors betting on more secure industries, and on scientific societies, which are the connective tissue. But she added that there had been some good outcomes, including a broader contribution to COVID research, more open online scientific meetings and a renewed recognition of the value of distance learning.

Science gives us hope that by working together we can get past this moment, said Córdova, but she added that we must learn how to emerge from it stronger and better prepared for the next pandemic. The importance of continuity of funding, taking the long view in funding for preparedness, has never been clearer, she stated.

Randy Katz, vice-chancellor for research at UC Berkeley, highlighted the many changes he had seen between the March shutdown and June. His university saw a significant shift in research towards COVID-19 challenges across nearly all disciplines.

He said universities had become microcosms and testing labs for some societal changes and life sciences and infectious diseases research had significantly increased.

In the longer term, he said, we need to find out how best to support remote work, how to ensure that the supply chain of the research workforce is resilient and how to rebalance the research portfolio following funding distortions arising from the pandemic.

More or less internationalism?

Tim Stearns, associate dean for research at Stanford University, asked the question: “Does the pandemic call for an introspective view or a more outward-facing view?”

Tensions on campus have led to a heightened student distrust of university administrations exacerbated by a failure of communications to get to all relevant parties, he said.

On the other hand, there has been a welcome renewed interest and commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Stress on computing resources has resulted in a commitment to improve computing capability.

The pandemic has caused universities to consider more closely their role in the local community, both as a major employer but also through medical care and science outreach.

At a national level in the US, political polarisation had resulted in the weakening of universally trusted sources of information, said Stearns, asking how scholars might break through this.

He questioned how universities can better marshal the incredible research capacity of universities to better inform policy. Should there be closer working with national labs and biotech or pharma, for instance?

Given the more globally mobile human population and that infectious disease does not respect borders, there is clearly a need for more international collaboration, he said, adding that science is a tool in geopolitics.

Stanford is focusing particularly on facilitating flexibility, sharing facilities and seeing sustainability as a unifying theme in long-term planning.

Uncertainty on four fronts

As for the UK, at my university (University College London) existing international collaborations are working well, but new ones are perhaps not being developed and developing world collaborations have been hit hardest.

Nationally, we are facing uncertainty on four fronts: the pandemic, Brexit, the coming financial recession and changing priorities arising from a change in leadership of the main research agency UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The UK government has promised a significant rise in research spend to increase research and development (R&D) to 2.4% of GDP, but it remains to be seen whether this happens in the face of a recession. Brexit may cause us to be excluded from European Commission-funded collaborative projects. The money is important, but the way these schemes facilitate collaboration will be the greatest loss.

The change of UKRI leadership heralds a welcome desire to improve the culture of research, which has become hypercompetitive, damaging the attractiveness of a research career.

Across the European Union there is disappointment at the R&D budget settlement, but the budgets are still very significant and the schemes do harness collaborative working. The parallels with the 2008-09 recession are less obvious in Europe since most universities are state funded and the national funding agencies in many countries were able to keep their levels of investment strong.

Long-term changes

What about the long-term lessons from and consequences of COVID-19 for research? Katz highlighted flexibility as a key issue, referring both to the National Institutes of Health’s response and the fact that agencies around the world were given time for, and in some cases funding, extensions (the European Commission being a surprising exception).

Even in Sweden, where the country did not lock down, the main universities acted in a very similar way to other countries, he said.

Speakers said space is likely to be significantly reconfigured with so much home working. I hope that we will make the early-career researcher experience more positive by allowing more independence, crack down on exploitative behaviours by some principal investigators and be more transparent about career options, particularly those beyond academia.

Hyatt also commented on the likelihood that we will consider how to be better prepared for future pandemics and how to make the research enterprise more sustainable in the face of such major shocks.

Córdova said universities had responded creatively to the crisis by radically reorganising the way they teach, something that has been called for over many years.

And Stearns highlighted that the way we communicate as scientists has changed, with online meetings, conferences and seminars becoming the norm, facilitating international communication and debate in spite of time zone differences.

Clearly the world of science and academia has been radically changed by the pandemic and much of this will stay with us.

David Bogle is pro-vice provost of the UCL Doctoral School at University College London, United Kingdom.   

This article was originally published on University World News.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy. 


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