Celebrating 5 years of RoRI

Five years ago, RoRI was founded to ensure that we have the evidence we need to realise the full potential of research

Five years ago, RoRI was founded on a simple idea: that transforming how we govern, fund, evaluate and communicate research urgently needs better data and evidence.

Much of this evidence already exists, but needs to be unlocked, scaled up or better connected to be genuinely useful. And there is a huge opportunity to harness the growing capacity and enthusiasm of researchers, funders, policymakers and practitioners to turn the tools and methods of research back towards analysing and improving research systems and cultures.

On 30 September 2019, Wellcome Trust, Digital Science and the Universities of Sheffield and Leiden joined forces to launch the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). You can read more about the launch here.

Building partnerships to enable and accelerate progress towards these goals has been our focus from the start.

Our Partners

As RoRI has matured and grown, its greatest strength is its consortium of partners.

We now have the active involvement of more than 20 research funders from 12 countries, who between them invest more than US$ 25 bn per year.

Our partners are typically a vital source of data and case studies, or provide the strategic spaces in which we design and run experiments.

Our Team

We now have a 28-person research and operational team which spans 8 universities in 6 countries (UK, Netherlands, Denmark, India, Australia and Argentina).

8 RoRI team members are based at CWTS and 9 at UCL – the two largest hubs in RoRI.

Through this model, we are able to codesign and deliver projects that can respond quickly to strategic dilemmas and opportunities that our partners identify, or are rising up wider policy and scientific agendas.

Our Projects

RoRI’s partners have prioritised the series of projects below for the current phase of our work. We are now undergoing scoping work for our next series of projects.

Matthew

A study of cumulative advantages in funding allocation

Narratives

The uses and evaluation of researchers’ narrative CVs

GRAIL

Getting responsible about AI and machine learning in research funding and evaluation

Funder Data Platform

A Secure Collaboration Hub for Metascience

AGORRA

A global observatory of responsible research assessment

Undisciplined

Future models of funding and evaluating transdisciplinary research

Peer Review

RoRI Atlas of Peer Review

Portfolios

Research funding landscape analysis

MetaROR

A platform for open peer review of metaresearch

AFIRE

Accelerator For Innovation & Research Funding Experimentation

As we look ahead to the future, we’re excited to continue building on these partnerships to tackle new challenges and make research systems even more effective.