Making Impact Plans make more impact

I’m in the midst of putting together a grant application at the moment, to the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Part of this involves a document describing the activities I plan to undertake in order to fully realise the broader societal impact of my work. Given the fuss that UK academics have made regarding the instigation of this requirement across all UK RCs a couple of years ago – long enough, indeed, for two name changes already, from ‘Knowledge Exchange Plan’ to ‘Impact Plan’ to ‘Pathways to Impact’ – it was something of a surprise to read in Nature that the NSF new Impact scheme is the first of its kind. Now personally, I have no objection to being asked about the wider impact of my work, even though it’s actually quite hard to demonstrate any kind of economic benefit (which ultimately is what the RCs are after) deriving from the kind of biodiversity research I do. Actually, it’s a positive thing to think about the ways in which one’s idle musings may actually be of some use to someone else. And particularly in this recession, with the looming presence of an austerity budget here towards the end of this month, it’s simply not realistic to expect the tax payer to fund me to sit and think, regardless of how culturally sophisticated that would make us as a nation.

So broadly, I’m in favour of impact activities, especially as they actually offer the chance of more money, to fund some fun stuff – in my field, generally initiatives in web-based data-sharing, or stakeholder involvement, but also potentially seeding spin-out companies, partnerships with industry, and so on.

The issue I have is in the way that impact has crept into the assessment process of responsive mode (i.e. ‘blue skies’) funding proposals. For example, NERC initially stated quite categorically that – providing they reached a certain minimum standard – Impact Plans would have no bearing on the decision to fund research, which would be entirely based on the scientific excellence of the main proposal.

Of course, although that may have been the order from on high, it is not what happened in the panel meetings convened to make funding decisions. These panels have a really tough job assessing an increasing number of proposals with a limited pot of money. Clearly, any additional means that they can find to separate the funded from the also-rans will be used. And given that they (and all reviewers of the grant proposals) had full access to the impact plans, these quickly became an additional way of ranking proposals. Great science, crap impact? Sorry, we’ll give the money to the proposal with great science and great impact.

NERC now state:

Research grant proposals will continue to be assessed on science excellence. Pathways to impact will be included for assessment as part of the usual review process and will be considered as a secondary criterion alongside risk/reward and cost effectiveness.

At least this is out in the open now, and we know where we stand. The remaining problem lies with how these plans are assessed – in the standard review process, and by scientists who do not necessarily (in fact, almost certainly do not) have any expertise in matters of ‘impact’, leading to potential frustration if your proposal happens to land on the desk of someone with a different view of impact from yourself.

So here’s my proposition. No impact plan to be submitted with any responsive mode grant proposal. Then, should your proposal be selected for funding, a condition of receiving the money is that you submit a formal ‘pathways to impact’ application which must meet a certain standard. Because the field would be so much smaller at this stage, these plans could be reviewed by a smaller panel of experts in the field of knowledge exchange and impact. This would save regular reviewers time. It would also, I believe, drive up the standard of impact activities, because if you already know you’re getting funding, but that you could get some extra money for a top impact plan, the incentive is there to make a really good job of writing it.

Just an idea, but I’ve yet to come up with a downside.

Pitching Biodiversity

Saturday 22nd May was about as biodiversity-centred as it’s possible to get: the International Year of Biodiversity International Day of Biodiversity. I’m not sure it made as big an impact as it might have done on me (a self-confessed ‘biodiversity scientist’), although I would wholeheartedly endorse the statement of Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. In particular, he puts to rest the outdated idea that conserving biodiversity is somehow a ‘luxury’ available only to rich countries:

Overall, it is estimated that natural capital constitutes 26 per cent of the total wealth of low-income countries, which is why slowing the loss of biodiversity was incorporated as a new target under the Millennium Development Goals. Let there be no doubt: it will be absolutely impossible to achieve sustainable development if we do not protect and preserve our biological resource base.

Accepting the key role that biological resources must play in development and poverty alleviation brings home how important it is for those of us working in the field of biodiversity science to communicate appropriately our research findings. This means treading the fine line between boldly stating the massive problems that we face, whilst at the same time giving some hope that appropriate action might be effective. According to Tim Caro, professor of wildlife biology at the University of California, Davis, this is a line from which both academics and NGOs often stray. In a letter to Nature last week, he writes that:

Some leading conservation biologists deliver unnecessarily gloomy addresses, closing with no solutions or a few anecdotal success stories. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), by contrast, can be too optimistic in their fund-raising lectures and magazines: false starts and dead ends don’t figure, because donors prefer winners. Both groups are misjudging their audiences.

I think we can all identify with this, in terms of how we pitch a paper. For instance, recently I’ve been getting really interested in identifying gaps in our knowledge of marine biodiversity – essentially, cataloguing biodiversity’s ‘known unknowns’. One result of this is a paper due out very soon in PLoS ONE, in which we used OBIS, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, to perform a global analysis which graphically shows where our knowledge of the distribution of marine species comes from.

Not wishing to scoop myself, I won’t discuss the results in detail – just mentioning in passing that the deep pelagic ocean, by a distance the largest habitat on Earth, is virtually unexplored. What I wanted to discuss rather was the decision we had to make regarding how to pitch the paper. One option was to note the huge gaps in our knowledge – the millions of cubic kilometres from which no specimens have ever been recorded – and go for an ‘Oh no, look at how little we know!’ tone.

Alternatively, we could have highlighted the fact that OBIS has managed to compile, in only a few years, 27.5 million records (each record is a specific location at which a given species has been recorded), meaning that we now have at least some idea of the geographic distributions of some 113,000 marine species. What is more, all of this information is accessible to anyone who wishes to use it. So it would have been perfectly justifiable to have written an ’Isn’t it fantastic how much we know, even in this hostile and inaccessible environment!’ paper.

In fact, we leant towards the former message, whilst making sure not to denigrate the achievements of initiatives like OBIS, the Census of Marine Life, and the wider community of researchers and institutes who have bought into this huge experiment in data-sharing. But it does bring home how these kinds of decisions – which are largely independent of the more objective process of actually doing the science – really influence the content of the published scientific record.

Mola mola signs in

The ocean sunfish – of which Mola mola is the scientific name – is a curious beast. It looks like a child’s drawing of a fish, probably less realistic than any other fish. But, it does indeed exist, basking in the warm surface waters of all the major oceans of the world. It is both the largest and most fecund bony fish, one 3.1m giant weighing in at 2235kg, and a (considerably smaller) female found to contain an unbelievable 300 million eggs. I’ve never actually seen one in the wild, and was sceptical about their existence until the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity a couple of years ago, where I saw some tiddlers in one of the remarkable aquaria at the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia.
The ocean sunfish. Yes, it’s really real. Photo from US NOAA.

Perhaps not the most obvious title for a blog, then. I suppose I could argue that it’s all because mola is Latin for millstone, and I’m writing from a city – Sheffield – littered with the things thanks to its rich industrial heritage and gritstone geology. But in fact there is some logic to my choice.

First, I needed something to reflect the major themes I intend to write about – biodiversity, marine biology, human impacts on ecosystems, and a bit of science-policy, and indeed the politics of science, too. A weird fish covers the first couple obviously enough, and symbolises the third – the sunfish is unusual in that it is not targeted by any commercial fishery, but I like the image of it drifting around, a passive observer of the havoc wrought upon marine ecosystems by the world’s fishing fleets, which have over the centuries systematically driven down the biomass, average body size, and trophic level of ocean life on a global scale. (Subject, perhaps, for a future blog.)

As for the more political side of science, well… Trawling an old fish book for bits of life history data in my first job as a fresh-faced biology graduate, I read a remarkable fact about the sunfish. Its skin, apparently, will resist a .22 calibre bullet, which sounded pretty impressive at the time. (It was, in fact, the second most impressive fact I found in that book, after the fish so poisonous it could ‘kill a tree’.)

Now, of course, after years of PhD, post-doc and now fellowship work, I realise that deflecting bullets is the minimum requirement for an academic scientist’s skin, which must also contend with habitual rejection of papers and grant applications, constant criticism, petty squabbling and back-biting and other forms of ‘healthy debate’. The sunfish, then, seems a reasonable role model.

So, as you can imagine, I’ve a lot to get off my chest. I hope that I will be able to stick to the point, for the most part, and write interesting things about the International Year of Biodiversity (this year, in case you weren’t aware), the psychology of bird watching, and the surprising effects of nuclear power stations on marine fish populations. But I hope too that you’ll bear with me on occasions if I venture off into discussions of the tyranny of Impact Factors, a typology of climate change denial (including, perhaps, a defence of the indiscreet email), and the use and abuse of statistical graphics. And if you choose to comment, rest assured that my sunfish skin will cope with whatever you throw at me.