In our Research Culture Uncovered conversations we are asking what is Research Culture and why does it matter? In this short episode of the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, host Emma Spary discusses the format and findings behind The Unnamed Research Culture Event (TURCE), held in July 2024.

The workshop aimed to address issues around poor research culture and to find empowering solutions for tackling challenging behaviours in research environments that are 'Not in the spirit of...'. With participation from 77 individuals, the event was based around 3 questions:

1. What should this thing include?
2. What might it look like?
3. Who else missing from this conversation?

Listen in to find out more about the key ideas and recommendations including what comes next and how to get involved. The episode includes:

• Planning the Unnamed Research Culture Event with Samantha Aspinall
• Workshop Structure and Participation
• Umbrella, Raindrops and Puddles
• Defining Research Culture Themes
• Key Themes and Discussions
• Practical Tools and Best Practices
• Core Values and Behaviors
• Commitment to Research Culture
• Future Directions and Movement
• Final Thoughts and Acknowledgements

A full overview of the event and the report with all the findings can be found on our Unnamed Research Culture Event website.

All of our episodes can be accessed via the following playlists:

• Research Impact with Ged Hall (follow Ged on LinkedIn)
• Open Research with Nick Sheppard (follow Nick on LinkedIn)
• Research Careers with Ruth Winden (follow Ruth on LinkedIn)
• Research talent management with Tony Bromley (follow Tony on LinkedIn)
• Meet the Research Culturositists with Emma Spary (follow Emma on LinkedIn)
• Research co-production
• Research Leadership
• Research Evaluation

Connect to us or leave us a review on LinkedIn: @ResearchUncoveredPodcast (new episodes are announced here)

Follow us on Bluesky: @researcherdevleeds.bsky.social (new episodes are announced here), @openresleeds.bsky.social‬ , @researchcultureuol.bsky.social

Leeds Research Culture links:

• Researcher Development and Culture Website
• Our Concordat Implementation plans and progress
• University of Leeds Research Culture Statement
• University of Leeds Responsible Metrics Statement
• University of Leeds Open Research Statement
• University of Leeds Research Culture Strategy - launched September 2023

[00:00:22] Emma: Hi, it's Emma, and for those of you who haven't met me yet, I lead the Researcher Development and Culture team at the University of Leeds.

Ever wished you had a research culture yellow card to show people something to help you call out behaviours that are not in the spirit of research culture? Well, that's how the Unnamed Research Culture event began, or to give it its less formal name, TURCE (Turkey). But we'll come back to that later. Well, it actually started as an idea over coffee, as these things often do.

That yellow card. Could we create something that helps to take the emotion out of addressing challenging behavior? Could we provide a clear set of expectations or expected behaviors that we could champion? Could we provide positive rather than punitive approaches to research culture change? We know from examples like DORA, the Declaration on Research Assessment, that there are benefits to this kind of approach.

For example, it improves the quality and impact of research. It can discourage gaming. It can help to promote ethical research practices and to reduce some of those unethical behaviors. It can also help to encourage collaboration over competition. So Samantha Aspinall and I sketched out a loose outline for this event over that coffee, thinking about what we wanted the two day event to look like, and then we pretty quickly discarded it.

This wasn't a Leeds thing. It wasn't owned by us. It had to be owned equally by the participants joining us. What we did decide on was a really loose idea. We had a mix of speakers, some discussion topics, And then we advertised it, nervously waiting to see who wanted to engage with us to be part of this project.

We were really pleased when we had 77 people sign up with various levels of experience in research culture. All of these individuals were there representing themselves, not their institutions, their groups, or their employers, and every single person that was involved in the workshop owns these findings and recommendations that I'm putting forward today.

The full report is available online and I'll make sure that I put a link to the website and all the documents So we started with our four provocation speakers. They had the job of getting us primed to consider the challenges and to ask why we might need this. Did we need this? Was this workshop actually going to continue?

We then moved into a set of questions for discussion. The first one was to define the scope, what themes we might cover and what we would need this thing to do. What should it include? We were really clear that this wasn't about redefining research culture or getting drawn into a discussion about the definition of research culture, but more of a collective view on what it could include.

And I termed this as the umbrella, the raindrops, and the puddles. So the umbrella is the overarching definition of research culture, and then we ask people to write down the individual topics or themes that became our raindrops. And finally, we group these raindrops into larger themed areas, Our puddles.

And we had a thunderstorm with the amount of raindrops we created, and we ended up with 25 puddles or key themes. So even if we met every single day for a year, we wouldn't have had enough time to tackle everything. But the entire list is shared and it is openly available. We really wanted to focus on areas where we thought we could make a difference and that weren't being looked at elsewhere.

We weren't here to replicate work. And crucially, we went back to how we started. with something that empowers individuals or provides a voice. Our potential themes included collaboration and engagement. So we all know research cultures are built on collaboration rather than competition, but that many research groups and partnerships often work in silos, which can disrupt the flow of knowledge and resources across disciplines.

We also need to acknowledge lone researchers. and how we can engage and connect them with the broader research community. And finally, we have to consider the partnership between academics, professional services, and research technicians, all of whom have a vital role in the delivery of research.

Collaborative team research ensures the recognition and value of all of those people involved. And this collaboration also needs to extend to all key stakeholders, including the public and our local communities. Our next theme included practical tools and resources. There are numerous examples of frameworks, networks already available to us to help us share resources, but one of the gaps we identified were tools to help us evaluate cultural change.

We also found that many of the existing groups were targeted towards a particular community, for example, professional services or managers of research culture. So this then gave us the question of what is available for everyone else? The next theme was examples of best practice. But instead of using best practice, which in itself could be viewed as competitive, we went for sharing practice.

Essentially, can we learn from what works and what doesn't by sharing? Sharing also helps us to set benchmarks for quality, integrity, and recognition in research. It helps us to improve consistency and reliability. But it also helps us to stop doing the same thing over and over again, particularly at a time when resource is really challenging.

Core values and behaviours came through a lot in the discussion topics and are often seen as the heart of a strong, healthy research culture. Having clearly defined behaviours written in a common language were judged by the group to be essential. These values included honesty, integrity, realism, transparency, collaboration, and commitment.

So probably nothing new to most of us working in research culture. Providing clear communication on the importance of research culture can help to empower individuals to take a more active role. But we must also recognize that communication and engagement needs to be provided at the right level of influence for individuals and groups if we're going to encourage them in this work.

I think it goes without saying that ethics and integrity are non negotiable in research and should be considered right from the planning stage through to the end of delivery of a project. This is an important step that helps to build trust in the research we do, but there are still challenges with the open sharing of research findings.

So how can we find ways to enhance transparency and reduce replication in research?

And the final theme was commitment. Supporting research culture takes a commitment from all stakeholders. It certainly isn't the work of a few individuals. There are various concordats, commitments and frameworks that institutions can sign up to to signal their commitment. However, signing up is the easy part.

The implementation and engagement is where the work really starts.

Next we moved on to what this thing could look like. The question was left deliberately vague so that individuals had the freedom to explore all options. And again, we drew all of the comments into themes and have openly shared these in the report. It is a long list, and if you have read the report, well done for getting through it all.

I'm certainly not going to go through it again on this episode. But to help us narrow it down, we went back to the original aims of TURCE. Something for individuals that doesn't overlap with existing initiatives. Something that doesn't need measuring or assessment. And something that builds engagement from individuals.

But most importantly, something that is achievable.

The first idea was a ground roots movement. We recognise that research culture networks are already in existence, and what came out of our discussion was the need for a movement, rather than the creation of another network. So are we now considering TURCE to be a movement? Any good movement needs a unified vision or mission statement crafted with input from its stakeholders.

Could we help to identify programs and suggest catalysts for change? A popular suggestion was the creation of a manifesto that would align into our vision and define the purpose and core components or pillars of our work. Or to use the words of one participant, Let's just focus on the clear do's and don'ts of research culture.

I think many of us will breathe a sigh of relief that there was little appetite to create yet another concordat or lengthy policy document. But what we do need is something clear and concise with accessible language that helps us to build engagement and understanding. We know there's a clear lack of consistent terminology across research culture.

So we need to clearly articulate what we're trying to achieve. And that sentence just took me four attempts to get out when I'm talking about clear articulation. Another suggestion was the creation of a repository, pulling together existing tools, guides and case studies. But the group acknowledged this resource takes time and financial support if it's going to be created and maintained properly.

But we're not saying that a repository isn't a good idea. And just looping back to the mission statement or manifesto, we felt it needed to be built around core components or pillars. Some of these included how we talk to each other and promote respectful communication. How we collaborate to share findings openly and transparently.

How we hold ourselves and others accountable for our actions. We need to have a commitment in being community led and being responsible to the needs of our community. A commitment to minimise power imbalances. And a commitment to using accessible language and avoiding jargon. As I call this event TURCE.

The final part of the two days was having a look around the room and online because it was a hybrid event, to see who was missing from the conversation. Who do we need to reach out to, to bring into this work as it moves forward? And as expected, we generated a healthy list of people and groups that we want to reach out to.

So I've given you a really quick overview of the unnamed research culture event, or TURCE, but what comes next is still unknown. We certainly weren't going to solve this problem in two days. So the recommendations we're taking forward are to consider ourselves a movement. There is certainly an appetite to take this work forward.

I think the most important thing is to find a better name. We can all agree that the unnamed research culture event is a mouthful and TURCE is certainly not a good alternative. We're looking at establishing an advisory group to think about planning and moving the work forward, possibly having another two events to consider the co creation of a unified vision or manifesto.

And this has to be one that clearly outlines the purpose, core values and principles that would guide our movement. We want to develop some clear communication tools to show our progress and to keep people engaged, to help explain the benefits of a movement and why it matters. Why we're asking this question.

And finally, we want to foster active participation and to reach out to the groups and the wider communities that haven't been involved so far. And at this point, I want to thank all of the colleagues and facilitators that made this happen. They came to the event with open minds, no egos. Loads of ideas and an enthusiasm to make things better.

They made TURCE what we hoped it would be and we're really looking forward to working with them on what comes next. I wish I could name check you all, but I would be here for another 20 minutes. They are all listed on the website. So the unnamed research culture event, TURCE, started out as an idea over coffee.

But after two days, it started a movement. Ultimately, where it goes is still undetermined, but we certainly aren't stopping. We may have paused in the last few months, but we're not stopping. There is plenty of work to build on and more people to bring into the conversation. Cultural change isn't driven from the top, it requires everybody.

And sometimes that can feel scary and isolating. Calling out poor behavior and practice can be difficult when you feel at the wrong end of a power imbalance. Could there really be something like DORA or the yellow card for research culture that enables people to say that isn't in the spirit of?

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