The Senior Research Officer

RESEARCH REPORT December 1, 2020 The Senior Research Officer Experience, Role, Organizational Structure, Strategic Directions, and Challenges Oya Y. Rieger Roger C. Schonfeld Ithaka S+R provides research and strategic guidance to help the academic and cultural communities serve the public good and navigate economic, demographic, and technological change. Ithaka S+R is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that works to advance and preserve knowledge and to improve teaching and learning through the use of digital technologies. Artstor, JSTOR, and Portico are also part of ITHAKA. Copyright 2020 ITHAKA. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of the license, please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. ITHAKA is interested in disseminating this brief as widely as possible. Please contact us with any questions about using the report: [email protected]. We thank Ex Libris for its sponsorship of this project. The Senior Research Officer 1 Table of Contents Executive Summary 3 Introduction 4 Research Goals and Methodology 4 Literature Review 5 About the Senior Research Officer 6 Career Paths and Requirements 6 Scope and Title 8 Primary Responsibilities 10 Funding 11 Power and Influence 12 Collaborators 13 Strategic Priorities and Challenges 14 Revenue and Fundraising 14 Increasing Impact 18 Research Support 21 Compliance 24 Talent 26 Research Analytics 28 Evolving Roles and Future of the Position 30 Structural Reflections 31 Acknowledgements 32 Appendix: Interview Guide 35 The Senior Research Officer 2 Executive Summary The senior research officer is an extremely important position at major research universities, playing a principal leadership role for what is typically a vast research enterprise. To examine the role within these institutions, we interviewed 44 incumbents at US research universities during summer and early fall 2020. Our key findings include: ▪ Many research offices have grown substantially but there is considerable institutional variation. University-wide research offices are now the norm, and there is a pull to increasingly centralize a variety of administrative services and enablement functions. There are some common approaches to organizing research offices but for every possible pattern we found exceptions. ▪ There are two basic models for the senior research officer role. In a “professional model,” the individual has taken on administrative roles of progressively greater responsibility and rarely continues to conduct their own research. In a “service model,” the individual sees themself as a faculty member and university citizen first and foremost, continues to lead their own research, and plans to return eventually to the faculty. ▪ Research revenue and research competitiveness are vital strategic priorities. Virtually all interviewees emphasized the importance of grant revenue and fundraising—some see themselves as the “chief revenue officer,” responsible for an enormous portion of the university budget. Virtually all interviewees prioritize their institution’s research competitiveness, as reflected in grants awarded and faculty recruitment/retention. And, many are personally involved in shaping large-scale collaborations of high monetary value either within their institution or in some cases with outside partners. ▪ Research support is seen as a major competitive edge and is often a management challenge. Many interviewees spoke about investments in core research facilities as an important vehicle to attract and retain associated talent. At the same time, supporting these facilities require extensive subsidies. No interviewee reported a coherent institutional strategy connecting all elements of research support and enablement. ▪ Growing tensions with China have produced a spike in compliance work and concerns about talent flows. Nearly every interviewee is devoting growing bandwidth and increasing staffing to address research security, foreign influence, and export controls. Many are concerned about the impact of these tensions on talent migration, both for scholars and graduate students. The senior research officer oversees an increasingly complex set of responsibilities. At the end of the report, we offer some reflections about how this role may change in the future and some of its possible implications for the structure of the research university more broadly. The Senior Research Officer 3 Introduction The research enterprise continues to grow more complex, competitive, interdisciplinary, and interinstitutional. Although academic research often is conducted in a distributed and grassroots manner, the senior research officer (SRO) plays an increasingly central and unifying role in stewarding research activities and shaping institutional policies and strategies. The SRO—who often holds the title of vice president, vice provost, or vice chancellor for research— typically holds responsibilities including overseeing external funding, institutional research safety and compliance, core research facilities, and research ethics and integrity. In this project, we examine the role and strategic priorities of the SRO at the largest US research universities. Research Goals and Methodology Research—an enormous part of the mission of many large universities—generates substantial revenue and impact, but also risk. In investigating the roles and priorities of leaders who steward the research enterprise, we seek to understand how the technical and social research infrastructure is changing broadly. In doing so, we aim to provide research leaders and those who work with them a sense of how the senior research officer role is evolving nationally. We also hope that this study will expand the understanding of key strategic priorities, including revenue and fundraising, research impact maximization, research support services, and new compliance requirements. We began this project with a literature review and an analysis of SRO job descriptions, organizational charts, and job postings.1 We subsequently interviewed 44 SROs between August and October 2020. We intentionally examined institutions with robust research agendas, focusing on those with the highest levels of research activity and concentration. To do so, we restricted our sample almost entirely to R1 institutions, within which we oversampled Association of American Universities (AAU) members. Many members of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) are included in our sample.2 In our sampling, we strived to maintain diversity by including both public and private universities from different states and of varying institutional size. We conducted outreach mostly by asking the director of the university’s library to provide an introduction to the senior research officer for purposes of conducting the interview, and we do not believe this approach introduced meaningful bias into the interviews conducted. Of the 64 requests, we received only seven outright declines, and 44 interviews were ultimately completed. We believe the interviewees, listed in the Acknowledgments, provide a strong representation of the largest research universities. For comparative purposes, we also interviewed a few senior research officers from somewhat smaller institutions. 1 Our initial analysis was based on an examination of the university websites of 120 research universities (representing AAU and APLU members) to identify organizational charts and senior research officer information, such as job descriptions, biographies, and appointment announcements. We also searched for new senior research officer job postings. 2 The R1 institutions are the doctoral universities with the most extensive research enterprises, according to the Carnegie Classification. The Senior Research Officer 4 The semi-structured interview format allowed us to explore issues unique to individual research institutions. We aimed to understand different points of view so that we can provide an empirical snapshot of the insights, perceptions, and experiences of those interviewed rather than striving for generalizability. The interview guide (included in the Appendix) covered trends in research support services and resources, internal and external collaborations, research information management activities, and priorities and challenges. We committed to our interviewees that we would not link their identities with individual responses in this report, in order to enable them to be as candid as possible. The project was conceptualized prior to the outset of the pandemic and interviews were delayed somewhat because of it. Most interviews were conducted as the subjects were preparing to support a new academic year that promised to be unconventional and unpredictable. After overseeing the shutdown of the labs, the interviewees were busy ensuring a safe return to normal operations and some had taken on the role of establishing testing centers for students, staff, and faculty. We recognize the considerable impact and consequences of COVID-19 on the research enterprise.3 In this project, we had a unique opportunity to explore broader structural issues and strategic directions, including those that will continue after the pandemic. In explaining this decision to interviewees, quite a number of them expressed relief to have a small break in their day from talking about and working on the pandemic’s disruptions. Literature Review In 2013, the Research Universities Future Consortium conducted research to identify the concerns and common

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