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Giving community leaders authorship credit on papers for research projects they were involved in is one way to help boost local impact, research managers have been told.
During a panel discussion at the Australasian Research Management Society conference in Darwin, Australia, speakers discussed steps that research support staff can take to ensure that their institution’s research is having a positive impact on local communities, especially marginalized groups. Patrick Thomsen, a lecturer in global studies at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, stressed the importance of involving community leaders in the planning of research projects, and said their contributions should be recognized formally.
“A lot of my ability to do research in the space that I‘m working in depends on the leaders in the community, who might not be researchers by the traditional definition, but by all accounts their contributions are just as important as mine in the shaping of projects,” said Thomsen. He said the Health Research Council of New Zealand, the country’s largest funder of health research, accepted his proposal to bring on community leaders as named investigators in his projects. “This means they are involved in the publishing of the research and they get credit for being the authors on the paper.”
The benefit of this approach, said Thomsen, is that it avoids the common scenario where a community leader or participant’s right to authorship is at the discretion of the lead researcher on a project.
“They have every right to be named as an author on the paper,” Thomsen said, adding that “as researchers, we have a responsibility to think of ways to do that, and to ask people, like our research professional staff, to help us”.
Wade Kelly, director of research excellence and impact at Monash University, in Melbourne, said that whether researchers are doing lab-based basic research or research that requires a lot of community interaction, they should inform themselves about what the people who stand to benefit most from the research actually want.
Kelly used an example of Canadian wheelchair athlete, Rick Hansen, who in the 1980s wheeled more than 40,000 km through 34 countries to raise funds and awareness for people with disabilities. Hansen said he’d talked to hundreds of people in wheelchairs during this tour, and the main thing they wanted to see progress on was accessibility, Kelly explained. “They wanted research about erectile dysfunction, and better wheelchairs. Spinal-cord research was pretty low on the list for a lot of these people,” said Kelly. “Even for the fundamental researchers, there’s an opportunity to better understand the communities we’re working with, to be asking really good questions.”
Both Thomsen and Kelly highlighted the importance of co-designing research with communities and urged research managers to work with their institutions to facilitate this. This approach ensures that community engagement and impact are not treated as an afterthought, they said, but as an integral part of the research process.
Rethinking data ownership
Another panel underscored the role that data plays in translating research into societal impacts. Cassandra Sedran-Price, a Muruwari/Gangugari woman and adjunct senior researcher at the University of Tasmania, spoke about the need for Australia to catch up to other countries in formalizing the rights of Indigenous people to own the knowledge and data they contribute to research — known as data sovereignty.
“The data sovereignty movement has been 20 years in the process in Canada, and they have great tools and practices in place,” said Sedran-Price, who added that the movement is just getting started in Australia. “You might feel like you’re a bit behind,” she told the audience, “but that’s because it’s new, it’s just starting. We’re all on this journey together.”
Sedran-Price highlighted networks such as the Global Indigenous Data Alliance and the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Collective as having valuable information on their websites for research professionals who are interested in learning more about this topic.
Simon Mair, chief information officer and chief data officer from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, said research managers also needed to be aware of data privacy laws and norms in other countries, which come into play if researchers are storing data on overseas servers. He noted that laws such as the US Patriot Act could compromise the privacy and security of sensitive information that is collected in Australia and stored on US servers.
Mair added that a big challenge for universities and research institutions is deciding how much research data should be made available for open-access and transparency reasons, versus keeping it under wraps due to privacy and security concerns. He said the best approach is to follow best-practice guidelines for data handling and to hire people who are experienced in data management and ethics.
“It’s important to employ people who understand the requirements and the sensitivities of the data and what could be misused or misinterpreted or reveal information that is sensitive,” said Mair. “If you employ an expert or team of experts to help you ensure those rules aren’t breached … you can put the data out there with confidence.”
Researchers on both panels called for a more inclusive and responsible approach to research, where impact is measured not just by academic outputs, but by benefits to communities.
