Research security meets Open Science

RoRI Senior Research Fellow Helen Buckley Woods attended the first European Flagship Conference on Research Security, held in Brussels and hosted by the European Commission alongside 12 stakeholder associations. Bringing together over 500 participants from across Europe, the event explored how to safeguard research amid shifting geopolitical dynamics, and what this means for openness and collaboration. Below, Helen shares her reflections.

I spent three days at the first European Flagship Conference on Research Security organised by the European Commission and 12 European stakeholder associations. Over 500 people gathered from the research security world to discuss processes, protocols, policies, and debate freedom and openness vs security and risk management in research.

The audience was interprofessional, with policy advisors, research security personnel, intelligence services personnel, government officials, research funders and a small smattering of researchers. We heard from over 100 speakers across the three days in what was dubbed a ‘spooky’ theatre in a hotel in Brussels.  

This area of work isn’t new, but it is gathering pace in its regulation and proliferation in response to geopolitics, most notably responses to relations with Russia and China. As one speaker aptly put it, ‘it could be the emperor’s new clothes, but we’re not quite naked’.

One question is, how desirable is it now to conduct research in line with established principles of research, such as Mertonian norms, particularly communalism and disinterestedness? One panellist wondered whether this might be a moment of disruption – a shift away from the traditional model of higher education toward something more fragmented, where universities focus on teaching and research takes place elsewhere.

Another question is how current practices and concerns in higher education research such as open science, transdisciplinary working, achieving impact and healthy research cultures square with ‘identifying the crown jewels’ in your research portfolio, de-risking, due diligence, attesting, checking connections and supply chains and so forth… 

And can research security measures that work in one discipline apply to another? Probably not.  

The protection of research against foreign interference, espionage and other bad actors can be found in numerous laws, usually spread across various ministries.

The difficulty for those research producing organisations, be they educational institutions or corporates is to have an awareness of the risks and where and how to get the right guidance.

The conference showcased many policy initiatives, both national and supranational, including the new initiatives at EU level building on the Council recommendation for enhancing research security. Examples from outside Europe included the US SECURE programme (Safeguarding the Entire Community of the US Research Ecosystem), and the use of pre-defined “high-risk” partner lists in Canada and Australia, designed to complement case-by-case risk assessments.

Some countries also offer a ‘one stop shop’ approach for HE institutions to get advice, such as the UK’s Research Collaboration Advice Team (RCAT) and the Dutch national contact point for knowledge security. These services do the work of gathering answers from the various relevant ministries to give an answer to a university’s question.

All the services and platforms showcased at the meeting were developed in conjunction with the research communities they serve, and were transparent in observing the relationship between government service providers and independent research producing organisations.

Funders are also playing a key role – by creating their own screening and due diligence measures as part of funding calls. Their role is seen by some as a useful lever to achieve researcher compliance, and for others as important intermediaries between government and researchers in protecting the integrity of research.

National policies and initiatives are bound and tailored by their context, their geography and the make-up of the research community they serve. At the same time, there is a desire for interoperable national policies and similarity of approaches, which I think can only go so far.  

The meeting was designed to support those in EU member states and other close country partners. That being said, what was notable was who wasn’t there. It was a very white audience, and I couldn’t help thinking, as was raised in one of the panel sessions, what will the impact of these policies be on collaborations with researchers in the global south, and what about individual researchers in countries which can’t be collaborated with, or where relationships are at arm’s length.

Despite all the talk of not killing researchers’ appetite for risk and enthusiasm for collaboration, the administrative burden, if not properly resourced, could easily have a wearying effect – meaning that certain topics become cold or researched in a different way.

Delays also matter: if clearance takes too long and a visiting researcher can no longer come, or a funding deadline passes, the direction of research itself can shift – much as earlier pushes for “practical impact” once steered the humanities toward more empirical work.

At one point, a researcher took the mic and pleaded, “no more bureaucracy for researchers!”. It drew only a smattering of applause, though at a researcher-led event, I suspect the reaction might have been different.

A played down take is that this is all part of the regular work researchers do on data management, ethics and basically doing proper project management. But at a metascience level, how this effects collaboration, the diversity of research teams, the ability to address global challenges and even citizen science is distinctively different.

Clearly science has never been completely open due to research use by bad actors or commercial interests, and to paraphrase one comment, the open science movement is not as idealistic and starry eyed as it had been painted by some at the event. Furthermore, risk is inherent to research: the unexpected happens, and, as one speaker put it, “we can’t protocolise everything.”

I think the next iteration of this conference will look quite different, as more research is completed and reported, evidence bases strengthen, initiatives mature, and the world (including the research world) continues to move on.