News

Welcome message from Professor Julia Black, Interim Director and Pro-Director for Research
Last year was a successful one for research at LSE, with increased funding from RCUK and other UK government sources pushing research income over the £30m mark for the first time. Funding for research will be a particular focus this year as we continue to assess the implications of the EU referendum. You can keep up to date with developments in this regard through the LSE Blog. Although the Treasury’s commitment to underwrite awards is welcome news, we are lobbying for the UK government to support science and research in its Brexit negotiations. We had hoped that the HE and Research Bill 2016-17, with the implications it has for social sciences and humanities (SSH) research funding, might be postponed whilst we work through Brexit. Sadly this is not the case, so we are working hard to ensure that SSH and QR funding are protected.   
 
Following the publication of the Independent Review of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), potential changes to the REF are also a key focus this year. Planning for the REF will be undertaken in parallel with our work to implement Pure, a current research information system (CRIS) at LSE. Pure will provide significantly enhanced support for the REF and improve the quality of our next submission. Contact the project manager, Johnny Novy, for further information.
 
Research Division continue to work hard to enhance support for research at LSE. This term will see the launch of the KEI toolkit and their Research Development Programme, RISe. Do head along to one of their sessions.

EU funding guaranteed beyond date UK leaves the EU
The Treasury has confirmed it will underwrite payments to UK universities participating in Horizon 2020, even when specific projects continue beyond the UK’s departure from the EU.
>>More


Research Division launches RISe - Research Information Sessions
This month sees the launch of RISe, Research Division's Research Development Programme for academic and professional services staff. Learn key information about funding opportunities and clarify understanding around REF and KEI. Interact with experts face to face, improve your working practice and become inspired by your peers and success stories. View the Michaelmas term events.

Book now for the Funding Information Day (FInD) on Tuesday 18 October 2016. The day will be dedicated to providing LSE staff with the latest news in the funding landscape, research funding opportunities, policies and trends. Sessions include a post-Brexit panel with representatives from the UK social science community and research policy community in Brussels, and an insight into large-scale funding opportunities available beyond Europe. Hurry, places are limited and booking closes on 11 October.

October also sees the first of the KEI toolkit training sessions, with a half day Introduction to Public Engagement on Thursday 20th. Organised by Research Division and Communications Division, the training will bring together external experts on public engagement and internal ‘best practice projects’ to help you understand who your ‘public’ is or could be, and how to get started with a successful public engagement project. Here's the link to book your place.


Stern Review of REF makes recommendations 
A sector-wide consultation on the future of the REF chaired by LSE’s Professor Lord Nicholas Stern has issued its report and recommendations. Among other things, the report recommends that all research-active staff should be included, that research outputs should not be ‘portable’ for REF purposes when researchers move institutions and that institutions should be able to submit inter-disciplinary impact case studies at institutional level as well as departmental level.

In order to not increase the burden of the REF when all researchers are included, the report also recommends that the total numbers of research outputs and impact case studies submitted to the REF across the whole UK sector should remain at around the same as those submitted to REF2014. If the recommendations are adopted, this means that the average number of outputs per person would fall to around two and HEIs would need one impact case study for around every 20 people submitted, with some flexibility built into both parts of the REF submission.

A consultation on the details of the recommendations and their implications is expected by the end of the year. In the meantime, the School will be planning its next REF submission on the basis of the REF2014 rules until and unless the Stern recommendations are adopted. 
>>More 


Jon Deer joins Campaign for Social Science board
Jon Deer, Research Division's deputy director and team leader of the Research Development team has joined the Campaign for Social Science board.

The Campaign for Social Science was launched in 2011 to promote social science to the UK Government and the wider public. It campaigns for policies that support social science inquiry in the UK, such as the retention of large-scale longitudinal research programmes. It has been particularly active in debates over Brexit and the Higher Education and Research Bill and helped to inform many of the final recommendations in Lord Stern’s review of the REF.
>>More


RCUK-FNR bilateral agreement
Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR), Luxembourg, have signed a Statement of Intent to encourage and support proposals that involve international collaborative teams.
>>More

ESRC Longitudinal Studies Review 2017
The Longitudinal Studies Review 2017 will explore the studies' continued and future scientific relevance, sustainability, and contribution to the wider portfolio of data and longitudinal research resources in the UK and internationally. The review will begin with a focused consultation to allow ESRC to gain input on the key scientific questions, and methodological and technological issues that their longitudinal investments should focus on or address in the future. Closing in November 2016.
>>More


LSE’s Professor Lord Nick Stern gives evidence at House of Lords S&T Committee Session on EU membership and UK science
View the session recording.

 
ESRC and AHRC Annual Reports and Accounts 2015-16 published
View the ESRC report. View the AHRC report.


Two research councils join forces with Rockefeller Foundation
ESRC and NERC have come together with the Rockefeller Foundation to identify gaps in knowledge and research to achieve the UN Development Goals. The collaboration’s priority will initially be research and innovation for sustainable and resilient human development.
>>More 


LSE's Dr John Collins presents at Newton Fund network meeting
Dr John Collins, LSE Ideas, presented his British Council Newton Fund Institutional Links “International Drugs Policy” project delivered in collaboration with a Colombian University at the Universities UK International Newton Fund network meeting. Institutional Links provides grants for the development of research and innovation collaborations between the UK and partner countries.

Increase and monitor online engagement with your research
LSE recently subscribed to Kudos for Institutions, reports from which will help us understand, amplify and support researchers’ efforts to improve engagement with their published work.
 
Kudos is a free, web-based toolkit that helps maximize and measure online engagement with academic work. Kudos maps the actions researchers take to promote publications against a wide range of metrics (including downloads, altmetrics and citations), to provide rapid feedback on the effectiveness of those actions. 
 
It differs from tools such as Altmetric Explorer - which tracks citation of research outputs – by guiding researchers through a set of proactive activities intended to increase the number and range of such citations. A recent study by the CHESS Centre at the Nanyang Technological University, showed that researchers who proactively explain and share academic work using Kudos see a 23% increase in downloads.
 
Since it supports efforts to increase and to track online engagement with published research, we encourage LSE researchers to register with Kudos and have a go at using the toolkit. 
 
If you have any questions about Kudos contact LSE’s research impact manager, Rachel Middlemass.


Call for submissions for LSE Research Festival 2016
LSE’s Research Festival is an annual celebration of the innovative and ground-breaking research in the social sciences by our staff and students. This year's Festival will take place on Thursday 3 November 2016. The call for submissions is now open and any LSE staff member or student can submit their research in any of these three categories: a headlined abstract, a photograph or a poster. A prize of £250 has been confirmed for the winner of each category. Deadline: Friday 14 October 2016.
>>More


British Council seeks panel reviewers for Newton Fund
The British Council is looking to expand its pool of panel reviewers for their programmes under the Newton Fund. They are inviting senior and mid-career researchers to submit an Expression of Interest by Monday 17 October 2016.
>>More 


Research support from the Library
Support available for publishing
The Library can provide support and guidance for scholarly publishing. Get in touch with Lucy Lambe, Scholarly Communications Officer, for advice on finding the right journal to publish in and exploring new ways to communicate your research. You can find out more about sharing your work online and making the most of open access publishing. Relating to this, guidance is available on your intellectual property rights and signing publishing agreements. You can also learn more about getting and using an ORCID iD, or request an identifier for your work (DOI or ISBN).


SocArXiv – a new home for social science pre-prints
Many researchers across all disciplines have become dissatisfied with the current scholarly communications model. The process of publishing is often slow, frustrating and opaque even to the academics it serves. Papers often take over a year to get from submission to being available to journal subscribers, and this does not include any previous attempts at other journals. One way to speed up and broaden access to research is to take inspiration from the physics community and share pre-prints, which are submitted versions of papers.  Most publishers allow for this type of sharing in their publication policies.

There is now a dedicated repository for researchers in the social sciences to share their pre-prints: SociArXiv. A temporary home for now, this will soon be developed into an open-access, open-source server that encourages linking and sharing data, code and any other supplemental outputs. The Library's Lucy Lambe is a member of the Outreach Working Group for SocArXiv and is looking for feedback from LSE academics – is this something you would use to get your research discovered and read sooner? Do you have any questions or concerns about it? Please let Lucy know your thoughts: l.lambe@lse.ac.uk.


Course Collection and stock moves completed
As part of the Library Space Development project, all stock moves (to relocate the Course Collection to its newly refurbished home on the first floor and to relocate books and journals) have now taken place. The new Course Collection provides more study spaces and more shelving, enabling more copies of core textbooks to be provided. The development project has the following aims:

• To create new and additional study spaces to meet student demand and improve the quality and range of study spaces

• To enable growth in key areas of our outstanding social science collection, by moving lower use material to closed access and offsite storage, addressing the fact that we are at full capacity with our physical collections.

The redevelopment work on the ground floor is complete and LSE LIFE, a new academic, personal and professional development centre for all LSE taught students, is now open. 

If you have questions or would like further information contact library.enquiries@lse.ac.uk or email Nancy Graham directly.

High Performance Computing (HPC) service update
Over the summer the HPC team has been busy working on many aspects of the Fabian system as various users across campus begin to use the system in earnest as part of their research work. 

The HPC web pages have been revised and now contain a section on ‘Getting started’ which is aimed at helping LSE researchers begin to use the system. A Moodle course allows users and the HPC team to interact, not only to answer questions about the Fabian service but to share experiences as they use the system as part of their research activities. In addition, there are a number of workshops including a hands on getting started workshop and a migration workshop helping users move their work, along with a program of surgery style interactions offering 121 sessions with HPC team experts.

The first edition of the HPC Newsletter was published at the end of the summer and future editions will include examples of how users have applied Fabian, covering the techniques applied to exploit the HPC resources and the impact it has had on their research. To be added to the HPC newsletter mailing list contact fabian@lse.ac.uk.

The funding opportunities highlighted here are a selection of upcoming calls, for a full list of funding opportunities view our Find a funding opportunity web page. 

Funding of £1.5-2 million and up to 3 years duration will be available per project through the ‘Network Plus’ funding model. Up to 5 projects are expected to be funded.

The deadline for Expressions of Interest is likely to be in January 2017 with the full submission stage in early summer 2017.

In support of the anticipated launch of this call the AHRC is holding a Town Meeting / Networking event at The Studio in Birmingham on Friday 4 November 2016.
>>More 


Growing research capability to meet the challenges faced by developing countries
The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) RCUK Collective Fund invites applications in the range of £2 – 8 million over four years to grow the research base in the UK and strengthen capacity overseas to address research challenges informed by the expressed needs of developing countries. Applicants must register their intention to submit by Tuesday 25 October 2016. The closing date for full proposals is Tuesday 6 December 2016.
>>More 

Sitting within the ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research, this new call will fund innovative, strategic and catalytic research that offers new ways to tackle the challenges encountered at the intersections between sustainability, poverty and conflict/fragility in specific geographic contexts.

Proposals will be invited for projects with a full economic cost (fEC) value between £200,000 and £300,000. The full call for proposals will be announced later this month. 
>>More

Resilience Research: IGA-Rockefeller funding call - second round

AXA Research Fund: Postdoctoral Fellowships
Each year, the AXA Research Fund offers funding for 25 Postdoctoral Fellowships to outstanding researchers.

Institutions are awarded up to €130,000 for the appointment of a Postdoctoral Fellow for 18 - 24 months. The funding will allow for a low Band 6 appointment; departments or centres wishing to appoint at a higher level will be asked to use their own funds to make up the deficit.

Eligibility:

• Candidates must have studied internationally for their master’s degree and / or doctoral studies.
• Only candidates without a permanent academic position are eligible.
• Candidates must have been awarded their PhD before the beginning of the grant and within the 3 years preceding the submission of their proposal.
• The research topic must fall in the scope of the eligible thematic focus.

LSE will be permitted to submit one or two proposals to AXA. All proposals will first be considered by the Research Development Panel, who will select who will be submitted to the AXA campaign.

Please get in touch with Kathryn Darling, Business Partnerships Manager, if you wish to discuss. Deadline: Monday 31 October 2016.
>>More

LSE Middle East Centre: Academic collaborative projects
The Middle East Centre invites applications from LSE colleagues for academic collaborative projects in social, political, and economic sciences between academics at LSE and Arab universities. These projects may involve collaborative research or capacity building. Aims:

• Promote high calibre research by scholars at LSE and Arab universities.
• Support academic excellence at Arab universities.
• Strengthen academic collaboration and knowledge transfer between LSE and Arab universities.

Deadline: Friday 11 November 2016.
>>More

---

Recent awards

Professor Mary Morgan, Economic History, has been awarded an European Research Council Advanced Grant for the NARRATIVESCIENCE project. The project focusses on the roles and functions of narratives in the comparatively modern period of science - taken as one broad relatively homogeneous period, of advancing technocratic and professionalised practices alongside changes in theories and knowledge. The overall aim is to figure out what narrative does for the sciences, given its variety of practices and functions.

Dr Rebecca Bryant, European Institute, has received funding under the RCUK Newton TUBITAK (Turkey) Research Partnerships call. Undertaken in collaboration with Koc University, the project aims to assess the well-being and needs of Syrian youth in Turkey and to show how they may be viewed not as burdensome 'guests' but as human capital that can contribute to the country's development. It also aims to formulate effective policy recommendations for burden-sharing at the EU and international levels and to examine successful and unsuccessful practices from Turkey's own recent past that will help in thinking about local and culturally specific recommendations for integration practices that would enhance the wellbeing of Syrian youth.

Professor Roman Frigg, CPNSS, has been elected as a recipient of a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award has been granted in recognition of Professor Frigg's past accomplishments in research and teaching and provides an opportunity to undertake research in collaboration with colleagues in Germany, contributing to the promotion of scientific cooperation between research institutions in both countries.

Professor Francisco Panizza, Government, has received an award under the LSE FAPESP Fund. Part of LSE's Research Infrastructure and Investment Fund (RIIF), the LSE FAPESP Fund supports collaborations with researchers in the State of Sao Paulo (Brazil). The project will research the politics of patronage appointments in Brazil.

---

Findings

LSE Research Online is a service provided by LSE Library to increase the visibility of research produced by LSE staff. It contains citations and full text, open access versions of research outputs, including journal articles, book chapters, working papers, theses, conference papers and more.

New research finds link between air pollution and traffic accidents
Air pollution appears to be causing an increase in traffic accidents, according to a new study by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE.

An analysis by researcher Lutz Sager found that small increases in the level of nitrogen dioxide in the air are correlated with a measurable rise in the number of traffic accidents in the United Kingdom.
>>More


First-time buyers priced out by the 'accidental landlord', says new LSE research
First-time buyers have been priced out of the ownership market by richer households who keep their starter homes for renting out when trading up, according to new LSE research.

Credit constraints requiring first-time buyers to put down larger deposits have been blamed as the main reason excluding young people from home ownership after the 2008 credit crunch.
>>More


Government reforms could put the sustainability and quality of early years provision at risk
New research from LSE suggests that government proposals to introduce a new national early years funding formula could put the sustainability of early years education and care providers at risk, and also put at risk the quality of provision available for children.
>>More
 

Report calls for global action to tackle dementia crisis
A new report from Alzheimer’s Disease International, authored by researchers at King’s College London and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), reveals that most people with dementia have yet to receive a diagnosis, let alone comprehensive and continuing healthcare.

The World Alzheimer Report 2016: Improving healthcare for people living with dementia, calls for concerted action to increase the coverage of healthcare for people with dementia worldwide.
>>More

Read more about LSE's cutting edge research.

---

Top tips

Compiling a research budget for your grant proposal
Step 1:   Complete a costing request form. To help you with this task, see some example travel costs.
Step 2:  Email the costing request form to rescon@lse.ac.uk.
Step 3:  Your grant applications manager will contact you to compile the budget for your research project.

Costing templates and further guidance are available on our web page. If you have any questions, contact the Research Development team.  

---

60 second interview
 
This month we interview two of our own, Dr Tina Basi, knowledge exchange and impact manager, and Dr Rachel Middlemass, research impact manager. Both sit within Research Division's Research Policy team. Together they explain how knowledge exchange and impact is being supported at LSE.

Tell us about your roles within Research Division
Rachel: As the School’s research impact manager I’m tasked with making sure we have enough high-quality case studies of impact for submission to the next REF, expected at the end of 2020. Along the way that involves providing strategic support to help both departments and individual researchers maximize the impacts of their research, as well as more practical help with evidencing and writing up those impacts as case studies. Although my principal focus is on the REF I’m keen to hear at this stage about any and all examples of potential impact, whether or not they currently seem likely to be REF-eligible.
 
Tina: I am a sociologist by trade and I worked as an industrial ethnographer before I came to LSE so although my job title is knowledge exchange and impact manager, I feel I spend most of my time carrying out ethnographic work – talking to people, observing, trying to understand concerns and barriers of doing knowledge exchange, looking for opportunities, and doing my best to communicate and translate the subtle shifts in Higher Education, and of course LSE, into a programme of activity. I started five years ago and had the privilege of learning from brilliant colleagues in Events (Sooraya Mohabeer) and the Press Office (Sue Windebank) – and of course our amazing bloggers! Teams have grown across the School and we are now working on the launch of a KEI Integrated Service.

What is the difference between knowledge exchange and impact? 
Tina: Rachel and I are a bit of a double act when we talk to people about KEI. KE is really about engaging with non-academics: chat down the pub; explaining to other people what you do for a living; opportunities to work with charities or other civil society organizations that can’t afford to pay for research; giving expert advice; etc. Most people tend to think of KE as giving evidence to a Select Committee but that really is only one end of the spectrum.
 
Rachel: Impact is basically what happens as a result of knowledge exchange. For REF2014, impact was defined as: “An effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life beyond academia”. The key words there are ‘beyond academia’ – impact is anything and everything that happens anywhere in the world as a result of academic research, as long as it’s happening outside the academic community. And it’s not just about changing policy or making money for UK Plc. Whether your work is shaping the curricula in UK schools or saving rare snakes in Africa, we want to know about it!

What are the expectations on LSE staff in relation to knowledge exchange and impact?
The central goal of the LSE KEI strategy is ‘to enhance the ability of LSE research and expertise to make a difference to how events or problems are understood and addressed around the world’. At an institutional level, of course, the REF requires us to demonstrate a tangible ‘real world’ return on the very substantial public investment that is made each year in our research.
 
However, the expectation on individual staff is really only that they engage as fully as possible with whichever of the KEI strategic objectives are relevant to them and do their best to help the School achieve its overarching goal of making a difference around the world. Your contribution to that could be big or small, but we hope everyone will think about what they can achieve and how we can help them achieve it.
 
What are you currently working on?
Tina: Reports to funders! KEI is still very new and our funders are keen to know how we spend our money and the ways in which our KE is most effective. It’s probably my least favourite job because it is difficult to put into words how electric and exciting some of our KE activities have been. Some of the projects engage with hard-to-reach and vulnerable populations and communicating the significance of this is almost impossible in 400 words.
 
Rachel: I’m always working on a whole range of potential impact case studies - and always happy to hear from anyone who thinks they might have another one to add to the mix! I spend quite a lot of my time in departments, presenting information or talking to individual academics about their work. I also co-manage (with Imran Iqbal, Department of Management), the Research Impact Forum for professional services staff with some degree of responsibility for supporting impact in their home departments.
 
Alongside that, we’ve both been working on the development of a new programme of KEI training for 2016/17, including supporting our Research Division colleague Peter Broekema with the provision of a half-day training event on Public Engagement. You can register for this and other RISe events through Research Division's website.
 
What is the KEI toolkit and how did the idea come about?
The toolkit was developed in response to what we saw as a real gap in the provision of accessible but ‘fairly’ comprehensive information about KEI to researchers. It also helps meet a need for academics to be able to access the many and varied forms of support for KEI that are available across the School in a more joined-up, ‘one-stop-shop’ way. In addition, we hope that it will provide a really useful basis for training and discussion sessions.
 
The toolkit includes a handful of ‘core’ introductory modules, which provide information about the steps researchers can take to share their work with non-academic audiences, who might use or benefit from academic research, how they might benefit from doing so, and how researchers can measure the effects of this non-academic engagement with academic work; there’s also a module that walks researchers through the process of developing a ‘pathways to impact’ statement for funders.
 
These five, core modules are available both in hard copy and online, where you can also access a much bigger (and ever-growing) pool of additional modules providing more detailed, practical information about some of the many methods and activities for achieving successful knowledge exchange and impact. Many of these have been contributed by colleagues in other divisions across the School, and will help users of the toolkit work out who can help them, with what, and how.
 
Do you have any advice for your fellow colleagues (researchers and faculty) thinking about knowledge exchange and impact?
Tina: Come and talk to us! No idea is too off the wall. We supported the build of a pop-up beauty shop that educated people on egg freezing – with an artist. I would never have predicted that project. We are always happy to have a chat or a coffee (or a pint!) if you want to know more how to get started with KEI or think you might already be ‘doing’ it and want to learn more about the support available to you across the School. And of course, if you’d rather explore KEI by yourself to start with, check out the toolkit.
 
Rachel: On impact specifically, I always advise anyone who thinks they might have a case study in the making to think early about evaluation and evidence, to ask everyone they think might be using their research to cite it properly (this makes its use much easier to track!) and to keep records of all relevant activities, outputs, outcomes and emerging impacts.

Do you have anything else you would like to share?
Rachel: I’m just back from a conference about the use of alternative metrics (‘altmetrics’), which track online mentions of research, including to monitor and assess the non-academic use and effects of that work. Online attention to research is increasingly important as an indicator of engagement with it and, potentially, of its subsequent impact. I’d encourage any LSE researchers who haven’t already done so to register through the Library for an Altmetrics Explorer account (it’s free!), which will let you see who’s currently citing your research in a range of online media, including in policy papers.
 
If you want to take a more proactive approach to driving up online interest in your work, register for a Kudos account (it’s also free!) and work through their three-step process to ‘explain’ and ‘share’ your research online, and then to ‘measure’ the effects of doing so.
 
Tina: One of the biggest challenges we hear about with respect to KEI is the lack of time. A key message we try to share is that you don’t have to do it all alone – in fact you shouldn’t! We can build a better project, activity, output, with greater potential for influence and impact by working with other experts – both inside and external to LSE.
 
If you could do it all again, what alternative career would you have chosen?
Rachel: A florist. A JIIG-CAL test (remember those?!) identified this as the career most compatible with my skills and preferences when I was 14. I should have listened, although since the second recommendation was ‘freight train driver’ I guess my scepticism wasn’t wholly unfounded.
 
What book are you currently reading and which have you enjoyed most in the past?
Tina: I’m reading ‘The Three Pillars of Zen’ by Philip Kapleau. I fell into the world of Osho and the Rinzai tradition of Zen Buddhism about 10 years ago and now I teach meditation (an annual thing at Glastonbury). Philip Kapleau is a pretty important person and I’ve neglected his book for far too long (academic guilt at not reading enough).

---

Get in touch

The next edition of Research Briefing is on Tuesday 1 November 2016. If you would like to feature a research story, award, or opportunity in this newsletter, contact Amanda Burgess in the Research Division by Wednesday 26 October 2016.
 
Research Briefing is emailed on the first Tuesday of every month throughout the academic year.  

Contact us
+44 (0) 20 7106 1202  I researchdivision@lse.ac.uk
Visit our website for more information and a detailed list of funding opportunities.