Campaign to strengthen status of supporting roles will ensure research excellence, says Dipti Pandya
I was recently at an event in Ireland where a person from a research funder was keen to point out that research management is not a profession in the same way as accountancy or law.
Such attitudes are understandable, if outdated. Many research managers and administrators remain employed on a per-project basis and are viewed as an overhead.
Some don’t even realise that they are research managers or administrators. In a recent consultation of European research managers, self-recognition emerged as a vital condition for wider recognition of the role’s increasingly indispensable place in the research and innovation ecosystem.
This explains why one of the major trends in research administration, running across successive conferences of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (Earma, which I chair), is the effort to define what these roles are and to win recognition for them among research-performing organisations, funders and policymakers.
Whatever definition we end up with, it should be drawn as widely as possible. Fundamentally, research management is a bridging role, mediating between researchers, funders, regulators, policymakers and businesses.
There are lots of places to stand on this bridge, from traditionally administrative leadership roles to those more closely entwined with R&I. Indeed, some of the lack of definition stems from this healthy breadth and diversity of responsibilities. But all of us are engaged in enabling R&I and this is at the core of our values and our strengths.
Networks and roadmaps
Earma has been speaking more and more of research management as a profession, learning from international counterparts. Global meetings such as the congress of the International Network of Research Management Societies are hugely beneficial forums, especially as research management becomes more international in terms of career mobility and cooperation. In May 2025, in Madrid, Earma will host the Inorms congress for the first time.
Recognition, and the campaign to get it, has formal elements. Spain, for example, recently recognised the role of research managers, or “personal de gestión”, in legislation.
One formal initiative is the RM Roadmap being coordinated by Earma with contributions from 35 countries. For the first time, we are beginning to understand both the breadth and the common experiences of the research management community in Europe.
At the European level, Action 17 of the European Research Area policy agenda, which focuses on the value of what it calls “R&I managers”, has given our quest for recognition a new layer of legitimacy. The European Commission is supporting efforts around professional development and recognition, building career pathways, upskilling and providing networking opportunities for research managers.
Other institutions should follow the Commission’s lead. At the first session to co-create the RM Roadmap, one piece of feedback was that “there is a need for support from government bodies and funding agencies to establish and sustain research management networks and associations”.
Bigger and better
Recognition is also part of bottom-up community engagement, with professional networking at its core. Opportunities, space and time for building networks and informal relationships are crucial, just as they are for our academic colleagues.
Many research managers and administrators work in isolation; Earma’s annual conference gives them a chance to see that they are part of a wider community and a profession. We are expecting over 1,400 delegates at this year’s conference in Odense, Denmark, compared with the 1,100 who attended in Oslo in 2022.
The conference will see the launch of Earma’s strategy for 2024-28. In this, the association will emphasise cultivating a future-proofed and thriving community that prioritises professional development and recognition. Successfully delivering that strategy will depend on the engagement of our ambitious and driven community.
Projects such as the RM Roadmap are helping Earma mature as an organisation. They are also providing the data needed to support the development of formal research management associations and networks across Europe.
We will use our position, including our new headquarters in Brussels, to ensure that all relevant EU legislation has the input from researchers and research managers needed to ensure successful implementation. These priorities will be reflected in a position paper we will launch at the conference setting out 10 recommendations for the next EU R&I framework programme.
Stakeholders in governments, funders and elsewhere, as well as our own community, must recognise that excellent research is achieved only through excellent research management. For that to happen, research managers first need to recognise and own our own success.
Research Professional News is media partner for the Earma 2024 conference, held from 23 to 25 April in Odense, Denmark.
Dipti Pandya is head of pre-award funding at University College Dublin and chair of Earma.
A version of this article also appeared in Research Europe