The Research Outcomes project is a cross-Council initiative to enable all of the Research Councils to capture quantitative and qualitative evidence of the research that they fund and to do so in a harmonised manner, collecting common information to a common format. This will help improve the evidence base to inform future strategy, demonstrating the economic and wider societal impact of past investment to Government and other stakeholders.
The work follows from the earlier Outputs & Outcomes Collection project, which in autumn 2008 delivered a streamlined and simplified grant final reporting process, followed up by work to establish the feasibility of replacing and augmenting the information gathering capability lost at that time with better quality data collected more systematically and at less burden to the academic community.
Councils have worked together, and with the wider research community, to define consistent business requirements for the notification, collection, attribution and submission of data relating to research outcomes, and to establish the feasibility of various approaches to achieve this objective. They have agreed on a dual approach to the reporting of research outcomes; collecting data wherever possible from research organisations and universities, backed by direct entry from individual researchers only where alternate sources are unavailable or impractical.
Update July 2010
Research Councils UK (RCUK) have now reviewed the project and have agreed to continue to move towards converged processes and systems across the Councils. This will be achieved through adopting a more cost-effective approach by each Council making use of one of the three outcomes collection systems already in use (i.e. ESRC Society Today, MRC e-Val or the NERC Research Outputs Database (ROD)) rather than commissioning a new system. These systems will be modified as required to allow outcomes to be collected on behalf of other Councils, and all of them will be brought under the umbrella of the Joint Electronic Submission system (Je-S) to minimise the administrative overhead and provide common user access.
The objective remains to align the data requirements of the Research Councils, so that where similar data is required (e.g. information about a publication) it can be collected in the same format across all Councils. RCUK will also continue to liaise closely with HEFCE regarding alignment with the REF data requirements.
All the Research Councils remain committed to harmonising their processes over time, where it is practical to do so, and to minimise the administrative burden on their research communities whilst still achieving their core objectives.
Keeping in Touch
The project has an email address through which you can raise queries or concerns, or make suggestions. All enquiries will be logged and responded to: researchoutcomes@rcuk.ac.uk