UK Government boosts investment in metascience

The UK government has announced a major increase in funding for metascience over the next four years, including a trebling of investment in the UK Metascience Unit to £49 million. The initiative aims to strengthen the use of rigorous scientific methods to improve science policy and research practices.

This announcement follows the publication of two major reports launched at the Metascience 2025 Conference in London, which together provide the most comprehensive snapshot to date of the UK’s metascience landscape and its global evolution: A Year in Metascience, a government-led overview of current activity and emerging priorities, and The Past, Present and Future of UK Metascience – a supporting technical report co-authored by RoRI and the UK Metascience Unit.

James Wilsdon, RoRI’s Executive Director, said:

Building on the vision outlined by Lord Vallance in his keynote speech at Metascience 2025, it’s heartening to see this fivefold, £50 million boost to the budget of the UK Metascience Unit.  This represents a resounding vote of confidence in the value and opportunities of metascience to improve the way the UK funds, manages and evaluates research. Now the Unit — and the community of researchers, policymakers, funders and others that is growing rapidly around it — needs to deliver on that promise. The next two years will be all about delivery — of robust evidence and effective interventions that can make a tangible difference to the qualities, impacts and agility of the UK’s R&D system.

To support cutting-edge research into how science is conducted and evaluated, the government will launch the second round of the Metascience Research Grants in February 2026. The £6 million funding opportunity is available to support Metascience research into more effective ways of conducting and supporting research and development (R&D), including the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), how to optimise research institutions and the challenges of measuring research excellence.

The government will also roll out Distributed Peer Review across each of UKRI’s research councils, a system that has already demonstrated potential to halve the time researchers wait for funding decisions. RoRI’s AFIRE programme has been an active contributor to the evidence behind these developments, most recently through Applicants as reviewers: a guide to distributed peer review, which distils lessons from international trials and offers practical support for funders considering DPR.

The growing role of artificial intelligence in research is also reflected in the government’s new AI for Science Strategy, launched by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) earlier this week. As part of this strategy, the UK Metascience Unit will lead a comprehensive ‘National AI in Research Survey’ to map how AI tools are being adopted across disciplines and career stages. The UK Metascience Unit has already funded 18 early career fellows to study AI’s impact on science, including two fellows based at RoRI, Youyou Wu and Basil Mahfouz.

RoRI is proud to have been a close partner of the UK Metascience Unit since its launch. This collaboration reflects our wider commitment to building the institutions, capacities and practical infrastructures that metascience needs to thrive, in the UK and across all the countries where we now work with funders, policymakers and research communities.