Abstract
Responsible Research and Innovation (‘RRI’) is a cross-cutting priority for scientific research in the European Union and beyond. This paper considers whether the way such research is organised and delivered lends itself to the aims of RRI. We focus particularly on international consortia, which have emerged as a common model to organise large-scale, multi-disciplinary research in contemporary biomedical science. Typically, these consortia operate through fixed-term contracts, and employ governance frameworks consisting of reasonably standard, modular components such as management committees, advisory boards, and data access committees, to co-ordinate the activities of partner institutions and align them with funding agency priorities. These have advantages for organisation and management of the research, but can actively inhibit researchers seeking to implement RRI activities. Conventional consortia governance structures pose specific problems for meaningful public and participant involvement, data sharing, transparency, and ‘legacy’ planning to deal with societal commitments that persist beyond the duration of the original project. In particular, the ‘upstream’ negotiation of contractual terms between funders and the institutions employing researchers can undermine the ability for those researchers to subsequently make decisions about data, or participant remuneration, or indeed what happens to consortia outputs after the project is finished, and can inhibit attempts to make project activities and goals responsive to input from ongoing dialogue with various stakeholders. Having explored these challenges, we make some recommendations for alternative consortia governance structures to better support RRI in future.
Highlights
The image of the lone scientist, or even single research team, working in isolation is largely anachronistic
We have discussed how typical governance arrangements for research consortia are structured by a mixture of funding agency requirements, the policies and practices of the institutions employing the researchers taking part in the consortium, and an array of existing regulatory requirements from employment, data protection and health and safety laws to rules governing the participation of human subjects in research
At its heart is a normative idea of responsiveness and adaptability: research and innovation should be inclusive, responsive and, ideally, tailored to the needs of ‘end users’ while recognising that these will often be heterogeneous and local in nature
Summary
The image of the lone scientist, or even single research team, working in isolation is largely anachronistic. Scientific research in the life sciences increasingly operates through large, international consortia. This is partly driven by the move towards a more data-intensive biology and biomedicine (Leonelli 2012; Vermeulen 2009). For the purposes of this paper, we define consortia as time-limited collective research endeavours, which operate under one or more contractual agreements, and typically have a formal management structure and governance structure (see Fig. 1). This approach is exemplified by the European Union ‘Framework’ and later ‘Horizon’ science funding programmes. The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed account of four key impediments to RRI posed by current governance arrangements, and to explicate their causes with a view to opening these issues up for wider discussion and debate
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