// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
I built the UK government’s metascience unit — here’s what countries need to know
Jen Gold is co-head of the UK Metascience Unit in London.
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Science funding agencies are increasingly setting up their own units to conduct metascience — using the scientific method to study how research is funded, performed and evaluated. In July, Michael Kratsios, the director of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, called for every federal science agency to create such a unit. A similar team is being set up in Ireland.
How can these units add value? As a co-founder of the first metascience team to be embedded into a national research funding system, I’ve seen how running experiments on live funding processes can make a difference. Launched in 2024, the UK Metascience Unit is jointly run by the UK government’s science department and a national funding organization called UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
Research funding processes often evolve organically, rather than through systematic testing and evaluation. Over the past two years, my team has run a raft of experiments and data analyses to identify effective ways of funding and supporting research and innovation.
For instance, we’ve tested whether sending e-mail invitations to potential grant reviewers that contain appeals to their sense of social obligation might increase acceptance rates (they didn’t). We’ve also assessed whether distributed peer review — in which applicants review each other’s proposals — can speed up the grant-assessment process. We found that it can, because the reviewer pool increases automatically with the number of applicants, eliminating the need to recruit external reviewers.
We are continuing to test fresh ideas. These include a trial of staff desk rejection — in which UKRI employees look for and remove non-competitive applications before the peer-review stage — to explore ways to reduce demands on reviewers.
But being the first such unit meant that the team had to learn as it went, with no template to copy. Here’s what I’ve discovered.
Why science has a credibility problem — and how to address it
First, and perhaps counter-intuitively, units should stay small. Metascience research shows that large teams tend to expand on existing ideas, whereas small teams disrupt them. A metascience unit’s job is to be disruptive: to make the case for change.