In an environment of low success rates, rising research costs, and shrinking opportunities, the research funding system appears to be at a crisis point. This isn't just a funding crisis but a culture crisis, intensifying workloads, stress, and precarity, especially for early career researchers seeking funding to stay employed.

A complete overhaul of the funding system is needed - but seems unlikely at present. In lieu of this, what can funders, institutions and researchers actually do to face up to these pressures?

In this episode, host Taryn Bell considers some doable - yet still meaningful - changes that we could make at varying points within the system, including:

• Increasing transparency from funders when communicating calls and outcomes
• More intentional career conversations - including making space for difficult conversations
• Preparing our researchers to get ready to apply much earlier than they think

We'd love to hear your suggestions for what needs to change in the funding landscape. Get in touch - and perhaps you'll be on a future episode of the podcast!

Find out more:

• Isaac Barbosa - BBSRC caps fellowship bids mid-call after surge in applications.
• Geraint Rees and James Wilsdon - Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems?
• Kirsty Grainger - Too Fast to Think? Why UKRI Calls Are So Rushed, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.
• Harriet Swain - Can ‘high-stress’ interviews for grants save a system under pressure?
• UKRI timeline of 2026 funding opportunities

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Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be? You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors to help you change research culture into what you want it to be.

Applying for funding is just plain hard. Part of this is because it's so competitive. The bar's always been high. It's not out of the ordinary to see success rates below 10%, but over the last couple of years, the funding landscape has started to get even tougher. Research is getting more expensive, funding opportunities are shrinking or disappearing, and more researchers are applying for the same schemes.

The result, calls are more competitive than ever. In the most recent round of the European Commission's Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowships, you needed to get a score of more than 96% to have a chance of getting funded. Scores that previously would have been unusual are now becoming the baseline. From what public data we have, we know that overall applications are becoming higher quality, pushing the bar for success even higher than before.

This has led an increasing number of researchers to turn to AI for help writing the strongest application possible. In a recent article in Nature, which I've listed in the show notes, Geraint Rees and James Wilsdon argued that this is leading to a huge increase in the number of applications for funding, with funders struggling to find enough reviewers to assess them all.

All of these different factors swirling around have unsurprisingly led to problems. One of the UK's major councils, BBSRC, were in the news earlier this year after they unexpectedly rejected all outline proposals to their fellowship scheme after receiving a whopping 586 applications for just 15 awards.

BBSRC have now introduced submission caps for institutions, and for a couple of universities, this now means a job of whittling down more than 50 original applications to just a handful that they're allowed to submit The way the system works right now isn't working for anyone. Individual researchers have to try harder and spend more of their time applying for ever-dwindling funds.

Research support services within institutions are facing a huge workload supporting an increasing demand for support. And that's not to forget the staff at the funders themselves who face similar workload challenges, managing growing numbers of applications while not being able to find enough reviewers.

It's no wonder that many have claimed that the current funding system is in crisis. If we're not there yet, we are rapidly on our way. But this isn't just a financial problem, it's a research culture problem too. Think about the environment that this is perpetuating. Everyone involved in the research funding process faces higher workloads, particularly when you consider that institutional demand management is probably going to become the norm.

Both academics and the research professionals who work alongside them are going to be expected to do more and more work to both submit and review more and more applications. And when we combine this with the fact that in the UK at least, many universities are making some staff redundant, there are simply fewer people to spread the work around.

This puts immense stress on everyone involved, particularly when you consider that this hard work isn't necessarily going to result in better outcomes for them There's also the issue that when working with early career researchers, I've personally noticed that they're now quicker to turn to funding, not primarily as a way of doing research, but as a way of remaining employed.

There are far fewer early career positions, particularly for those in the humanities and social sciences, so funding can seem like the only option left. But with schemes becoming ever more competitive, the increases we're seeing in application numbers simultaneously bring down success rates even further.

Heavy workloads, intense competition, increased precarity, this is an untenable situation. But to use an old phrase, there's no magic money tree. As I record this episode, we are in the first week of a new prime ministership in the UK, and while Andy Burnham, our new prime minister, hasn't been terribly clear so far on, on what he wants to do with universities, it feels to me at least that government help is probably not coming anytime soon.

So what can we do? In the rest of this episode, I'm gonna take a brief trip through what funders, universities, and researchers can all do in light of these pressures. Let's be honest with ourselves. There are massive structural issues involved in many of these problems, and in an ideal world, we'd break down the entire funding landscape and start all over again.

But I'm trying to be realistic given everything involved in this and given the pressures that UK universities are going through, and I'm gonna try and offer some pointers on actual doable things that might make some kind of difference, even if only small I said we'd start small, but actually let's start big with the funders.

There have been lots of suggestions from other people much more in the know than I over how funders should change their processes. A really radical solution which has been posed is a universal basic research income. This is the idea that national funding bodies provide every researcher with a set amount of money each year with which to do their research.

Now, this is a fascinating idea to me, and in the process of writing this episode, I began to think maybe we should spend an entire episode in, on this at some point in the future. But if we look at the reality of research today, I can't see this happening without a complete and utter shakeup of the entire funding landscape.

And again, as I've said before, this is needed, but realistically, it's not gonna happen anytime soon. There are also questions about how money would be allocated, because obviously not all research costs the same amount. When I worked in research, my research area was, in terms of direct costs at least, extremely inexpensive, but I had colleagues in exactly the same department whose research was extremely expensive.

So how do those different costs get taken into account when allocating research income? Realistically, I think as things stand, this would be an extremely difficult measure to bring into force under current systems. So what else could funders do? Well, there are things that they are already doing. You know, I mentioned already BBSRC's decision to bring in submission caps, and this seems to be a move that many of the UK's other research councils have suggested they could follow if their schemes are overwhelmed with applications.

The European Research Council recently got themselves into hot water after making changes to resubmission rules for some of their major grants, but they were later forced to reverse this change, at least for the time being In both of these cases, the public backlash was less about the fact that the funders were trying to reduce the number of applications.

It was that the changes were made with so little notice. This takes me onto my first piece of advice to funders. Be as transparent as possible about processes and timeframes. This seems simple, but I think many of the funders are not managing to do this terribly well at present. I acknowledge that this can be really difficult for funders, particularly those supported by national governments.

You know, Kirsty Granger has written a great piece, which again, I've put in the show notes, in which she talks about the tight funding timelines that UK Research and Innovation, or UKRI, have struggled with. They often don't know what their budget allocation is until very close to the time that they need to start spending that money.

Um, but they have acknowledged that there's a problem, and in spite of all these challenges, they are taking steps to increase their transparency. For example, they recently published a list of calls from June to December twenty twenty-six to give researchers more time to plan. If funders are gonna make changes, they need to advertise these loud and clear and give as much notice as they possibly can.

But what about the way funders review applications? Could this be altered to fix the problem of not enough reviewers? A recent UKRI meta-science scheme advised applicants that the funder would be using a process called distributed peer review, where applicants were also assessors reviewing up to ten proposals from other applicants.

Different reviewer pools meant that reviewing others' proposals won't have any effect on the ranking of your own application. If applicants don't provide reviews by the deadline, their proposal is automatically rejected. This is a really exciting change as it means less work for staff at the funder trying to find reviewers, but it also provides an impetus for reviewers to complete those assessments.

However, at the same time, this also means a bigger administrative burden on applicants who also have to act as reviewers, and ten proposals is a lot of proposals to review. But you could argue that this will also encourage researchers not to put in applications half-heartedly if they know that submitting will mean extra work for them after submission One final point on the part of funders is feedback and the role that good feedback can play.

There are so many major schemes out there where applicants get no feedback whatsoever, which I honestly find a bit ridiculous given how much work applicants put into these applications. I understand the pressures that funders are under, but this is simply bad practice in my eyes. This is perhaps where generative AI tools could be incredibly helpful if used properly and responsibly, because they could allow funders to distill reviewer feedback and panel discussions into actionable feedback for applicants, rather than leaving them to guess at what they did or didn't do right.

So there are plenty of things that funders could have put in place to ease some of the pressure and inequities involved in applying for research. But what can research institutions do? From an institutional standpoint, we need to go back as early in the funding process as possible before someone is even thinking of applying.

Those initial conversations with research support professionals, research directors, and line managers are crucial in setting the scene and giving potential applicants a realistic idea of whether they should apply. Managers of researchers in particular need to be prepared to have conversations about funding early on, right at the start of the person's contract.

This isn't just a matter of funding, this is a career development issue. Sometimes this can avoid a difficult conversation later on where you have to tell someone that their track record isn't competitive for a particular scheme, for example, or it can help them to plan, you know, to get more leadership experience or to take on citizenship roles in their field.

As researcher developers, we need to support managers to have these discussions, including difficult discussions early on, preparing our researchers and helping them to take the steps they need to pave the way for a successful application. I really worry that too often researchers are being pushed in the direction of research funding simply because it's the only route their managers see for them, rather than because it's the right time and the right idea.

We also need to work harder within universities to minimize what I call the hidden curriculum of funding, by which I mean the unwritten rules around funding. At present, in too many institutions, the level of support you're given is highly dependent upon two things. Firstly, having support systems around you, and secondly, knowing that you can and should access these systems.

There's still too much of a tap on the shoulder culture where only the chosen few are encouraged in their efforts. Support needs to be equally available to everyone. One of the points that I'm slowly coming around to is that I think institutions should standardize more of their demand management processes.

In most institutions, individual departments or schools have to develop their own processes, sometimes with little notice, when there are plenty of good examples from central support that could easily be adapted for use by each school. This saves schools having to develop their own policies piecemeal over successive calls and ensures that the processes are as equitable as they can be.

I'm always amazed at the ways in which universities are able to invent and reinvent processes instead of just learning from how others do things So we've looked at funders, we've looked at institutions. The final piece in the puzzle is the researchers themselves. As I alluded to earlier, it feels a little icky, I guess, to give researchers tips as it treats the situation like it's their responsibility to fix when we know that there are bigger structural issues.

But in the short term, there are things researchers can do to give themselves the best chance in the face of challenging odds. I would say that without a doubt, the best thing researchers can do is start preparing long before a call is even announced, long before you even think you're ready to apply for funding.

Researchers should talk to their line manager or supervisor about what options are open to them, take up opportunities to develop their research ideas throughout their PhD and postdoc, and start thinking early. We should be encouraging our researchers to find research mentors and learn what they can about funding for them.

We should encourage them to talk to people who've applied to other schemes that they're interested in, whether they were successful or not. They need to find out what other support is available to them at their institution and start having conversations with those people as early as they can. I always say it's never too early to start thinking about whether you're ready, whether funding is the right route for you, and what your options are.

My second piece of advice is a classic one. Get as much peer review as you can. Researchers should be asking for feedback from experts in their fields, but also colleagues with no knowledge of your subject area, research support colleagues, and colleagues with knowledge and experience of your particular funder.

Yes, it is uncomfortable and sometimes painful to have colleagues going through your application with a fine-tooth comb, but you always benefit in the long run. I'd much rather my colleagues tease out the weak spots in my application rather than the final reviewers. Realistically though, all these small changes aren't going to fix a system that is broken and unsustainable.

We do need radical change to develop a system genuinely made for the twenty-first century. But I'm also a realist. We are living in a very difficult period for academia and, and for society in general, and I don't think it would be responsible for me to just call for radical change without offering some solutions in the here and now.

That said, I'd love to hear your ideas for what else you think we could do to shake up the funding landscape. What have I missed? Have you got a really radical idea in mind, or has your institution or funder already done something that you'd like to share with us? Get in touch with us to let us know and maybe you'll be on a future episode of the podcast.

So that's all for this week. We'll see you again soon for another episode of Research Culture Uncovered. Thanks for listening to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast. Please subscribe so you never miss out on our brand new episodes. And if you're enjoying the discussions, give us some love by dropping a five-star rating and written review as it helps other research culturists find us.

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