Introduction
In their Science editorial ‘Scientists’ role in defending democracy’, Gretchen Goldman and Erica Chenoweth describe how scientists’ ability to tell the truth, coupled with their substantial social standing, can contribute to preserving the ability to uphold the principles of scientific enquiry within a free society (Goldman & Chenoweth, 2025).
The theme of research as a civic duty was similarly prominent in the ‘Independent review of the UK’s research, development and innovation [RDI] organisational landscape’ undertaken by Paul Nurse and published in 2023. Within his analysis of the UK’s overall research, development and innovation landscape, Nurse wrote:
Although there are differences in the ways RDI is carried out in the various parts of the landscape, there are common values throughout. These include pursuit of research built on verifiable and credible data, an objective mindset when undertaking the processes to gather those data, rational thinking, a healthy scepticism, an abhorrence of the falsification or distorted selection of data, and a commitment to academic freedom. Research in science and other disciplines is the pursuit of truth, and requires a culture and community which fully embraces that principle. (Nurse, 2023)
Following this review, the UK became the first country in the world to establish a formal Metascience Unit in 2024, which works across the Department of Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the UK Research and Innovation Council (UKRI), and in which the central topic of study was research itself (Nurse, 2023). It originates from the idea ‘that the scientific method should be applied to the systems, policies and processes of science itself, so that we can improve them’ and the field of metascience was established to test and evaluate the effectiveness of new approaches to research and innovation funding and conduct experiments (Nelles & Vorley, 2025). Outlining the significance of this launch in a blog post published by Wonhke, James Wilsdon, the executive director of the Research on Research Institute (RoRi) described the launch as an indication of the UK government’s commitment to the ‘science of science’ policy agenda (Wilsdon et al., 2025).
In June 2025, supported in part by a Coefficient Giving grant of US$50,000, the Center for Open Science organized the Metascience UK conference, in partnership with RoRI. This global gathering hosted by UCL sought to facilitate knowledge sharing and community building to define a road map of priorities to accelerate science, and Wilsdon’s observation regarding the government’s prioritization of such work was confirmed. During his opening speech at Metascience UK 2025, the Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation, Patrick Vallance, announced an investment of £86 billion in Research and Development over the next three years, continuing a trend of increasing government spending in this area since 2019.
As Jen Nelles and Tim Vorley described in ‘The applications of metascience to research and innovation systems’, the ‘meta’ prefix in contemporary work in metascience denotes ‘an approach that critically analyses a field but at a higher or systems level’ (Nelles & Vorley, 2025). In this article, I seek to direct attention to the systems‑level focus of the field. Informed by the size of the funds being allocated towards research and development initiatives, with which metascience concerns itself, I argue that the analyses that research on research attempts to conduct, when used resourcefully and thoughtfully, and in a joined‑up way, bear the potential to support efforts to defend democratic society. However, throughout, I also argue that now is an opportune time to engage systems change level thinking when reviewing emerging efforts relating to the ‘science of science’, including working groups, guidelines, task forces and alliances.
Questionable research practices, misconduct and scientific fraud
One issue that is examined by researchers in the field of metascience is how to respond to the proliferation of questionable research practices and misconduct, and how to cultivate an environment for good research practice. Entities that enable scientific fraud at scale are increasingly being recognized as growing rapidly and becoming increasingly resilient with the emergence of new technologies. These include ‘predatory journals’, paper mills, the mass production of poor quality and fabricated research and the emergence of ‘brokers’ selling authorship on previously accepted papers (Richardson et al., 2025).
Questionable research practices (QRPs) are defined by the National Academy of Sciences as actions that are detrimental to the traditional values of the research enterprise with the potential to jeopardize the integrity of the research process. In relation to research data, they can include the falsification or fabrication of results for the purpose of obtaining a publication in order to advance one’s academic career (Panel on Scientific Responsibility and the Conduct of Research, 1992). Recent taxonomies have observed dozens of questionable practices across fields. These include a community‑generated list of 58 field‑specific QRPs in the quantitative humanities, 40 of such practices, for which a comprehensive list has been made, within psychology (Larsson et al., 2023, Nagy, 2025).
Tying together such practices with the popularity of the contemporary metascience movement, in his recent article ‘Questionable Metascience Practices’, however, Mark Rubin highlighted the risk that metascience itself could inadvertently encourage questionable research practices. It could, he warned, facilitate practices, assumptions and perspectives that commentators have demonstrated could be potentially problematic for the science reform movement (Rubin, 2023). With this concern in mind, I consider the contemporary significance of systems changing thinking to the field of metascience, and provide some examples of the guard‑rails and opportunities it might be able to provide.
Barriers to improving the research system
A lack of holistic thinking in the academic reward system means that incentives for career development in academia and good research practices are frequently in conflict (Kun, 2018). Commitments to improving research assessment to ensure that metrics used are rigorous, accessible and well‑suited to attest to the quality of the research they are concerned with, such as the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which has over 25,000 signatories, have been widely welcomed. However, recommendations are yet to be meaningfully implemented across the research system as a whole (van der Aalst et al., 2023). In addition to this, the proliferation of concordats and initiatives launched in the higher education landscape in the last decade has had the effect of creating highly specialized staff who work in siloed environments and have little knowledge of the aligned work of their peers, or of how to use the tools that they create (D’Anna et al., 2024).
A 2019 study examining the levels of compliance with the Concordat to Support Research Integrity found that, more than six years after the publication of the Concordat, nearly half of UK universities failed to comply with all its recommendations. The deepening financial crisis within higher education is placing expectations on staff to do more with less, causing rates of burnout amongst staff in professional services roles to increase (Barkhuizen, 2013). Significant statistical evidence has been found to demonstrate a moderate positive relationship between work intensity and burnout in UK higher education (Wolfe, 2025). This leads to unplanned staff absences, high rates of turnover and a resultant discontinuity of initiatives that require sustained effort. In today’s environment of universities’ limited budgets and competing policies, support and academic staff are overburdened and at a higher risk of burnout, meaning that initiatives are harder to fulfil and progress is stalled as a result.
In their influential paper ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’, written in 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber introduced the term ‘wicked problems’ to describe complex, multifaceted issues that lack clarity in both their aims and their solutions (Chan & Xiang, 2022). Here, they argued that ‘the classical paradigm of science and engineering’, which they believed underpinned modern professionalism ‘is not applicable to the problems of open societal systems’. Their argument underscores how the focus within modern science’s emphasis on goal formation and efficiency serves to distract from understanding the broader societal context in which effective ways of attending to a complex problem, such as the scholarly publishing system, can be addressed (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Additionally, as Ryan Murphy and Peter Jones argued in ‘Towards systemic theories of change: high‑leverage strategies for managing wicked problems’, disciplinary siloes need to be surpassed in order to make significant progress on such problems. To fully comprehend such problems, they contend, researchers are required to become ‘students of complexity’, capable of synthesizing multiple perspectives, by making use of a wide range of methodologies and epistemologies (Murphy & Jones, 2021).
How could system thinking help?
Rittel and Webbers’ insights underscore the importance of viewing societal problems through a lens that recognizes the difference between these issues and those that scientists are trained to deal with. As such, by virtue of the social nature of the problems relating to the research ecosystem, it is necessary for scientists working to advance the field of metascience to acknowledge that addressing them solely as a scientific issue is currently insufficient. Moreover, systems change, which emerged in response to the need to understand difficult social problems, attends to parallel issues that exist within the scholarly ecosystem, such as that of many stakeholders striving to deal with complex problems without being sufficiently aware of others’ efforts (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Describing systems thinking in his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge wrote:
(Systems thinking) …is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns rather than static snapshots. It is a set of general principles spanning fields as diverse as physical and social sciences, engineering and management (Senge, 1994).
Within such a framework, systems, as Donella Meadows described in Thinking in Systems (2008), correspond to: ‘A set of things – people, cells, molecules or whatever – interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behaviour over time’, which systems thinking seeks to address (Meadows, 2008). The theoretical work of Meadows and Senge, particularly the report ‘The water of systems change’ (2018) on which Senge was an author, has had a significant impact on the development of work that seeks to attend to social problems, informing the work of charities, funders and practitioners on a global scale (Abercrombie et al., 2018, Kania et al., 2018).
Network mapping, toolkits, and leverage points
As Cameron Willis et al. demonstrated in their article ‘System tools for system change’, systems change theory contains a wealth of tools that support decision makers via concept mapping, social network analysis, system dynamics modelling and knowledge management (Willis et al., 2012). The Start Network developed a variety of tools to facilitate relationship, resource and power mapping, which includes guidance in applying the ‘Three Horizons’ framework, a way of aiding strategic thought about transformation and enacting change through examining the organization of power and resources in relation to the present, period of change and the future. The Network also provides a tool to facilitate the mapping of experiments, resources and relationships over time and amongst individuals, interdisciplinary groups and cross‑sector groups.
Systems change involves the coordination of support that sustains network activities. It encourages convenings, facilitates guiding participants through group processes and serves as a catalyst by fostering opportunities to bring people together to foster opportunities to expand the impact of a network. For instance, Fabian Pfortmüller’s ‘Community Canvas’ template helps support groups to align communities around the three key themes of identity, experience and structure. It also encourages stakeholders to think about a problem holistically, with recourse to ideas including shared experiences, rules, roles, governance structures, organizational behaviours, finances and capacity to manage change. Similarly, Pfortmüller’s concept of ‘community weaving’, detailed in his Community Weaving Handbook, invites collective thinking about the nature of relationships, roles and the shared possibility that unites a community (Pfortmüller & Luchsinger, 2013).
Within the context of systems change, leverage points are understood as points of attention within a system where targeted intervention can produce outsized results (Ehrlichman, 2021). In her 1999 study ‘Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System’, Donella Meadows wrote of leverage points:
Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in ‘leverage points’. These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything ... Leverage points are points of power (Meadows, 1999).
According to Meadows, the potential effectiveness of an intervention is determined by whether it is deep or shallow in quality, and leverage points may target a variety of types of systems characteristics, namely, parameters, feedbacks, design and intent (Abson et al., 2017). Building on the work of Meadows, Absen et al. examined deep leverage points in ‘Leverage points for sustainability transformation’, describing these as those which deal with intent: those underlying values, goals and world‑views of actors that shape the orientation of a system. While these may be more challenging to target, they argued, attending to them bears the greatest potential to bring about transformational change (Abson et al., 2017). It is this centering of the recognition of the value of confronting difficult challenges within systems thinking that makes it so significant. Arising from this, there is a wealth of literature and frameworks available to cultivate thinking about the mental models, shared values and sources of trust that need to be understood in order to sustain effective collaboration, convening and collective action to bring about meaningful change in the long term.
Opportunities for drawing on systems change in scientific publishing
As I examined earlier, metascience aims to attend to the complex issues that arise in the research ecosystem. It has yet to adequately heed the potential of utilizing the resources available from the field of systems theory research, which arose out of a recognition of the need to attend to the challenge of complexity. While some exceptions do exist, which serve to highlight how points of a system may become points of leverage when they sufficiently factor in ways to incorporate the values of an ecosystem, opportunities to reduce obstacles in the future still fail to be fully utilized.
One example of utilizing a point of leverage involves heeding and attending to the willingness of authors to engage with good research data management practices early in the publications process at the Francis Crick Institute, where Paul Nurse, who raised the issue of the ‘abhorrence of the falsification or distorted selection of data’ in his report informing the establishment of the Metascience Unit, was previously the Director (Nurse, 2023). In July 2024, a new process – developed to facilitate data integrity at the Crick – was launched to support the adoption of good research practices (Ventsel & Montague‑Hellen, 2025). This workflow was designed in collaboration with key stakeholders to ensure that all data generated at the Crick is appropriately organized, described and either archived or shared for preservation or facilitating reuse. Due to the planning prior to and the training throughout the introduction of the process, the compliance rate with the process stands at 99% (Gibson, 2025). The widespread uptake of this workflow also helps to discourage practices which amount to malpractice, such as the falsification of data, by building responsibility and accountability into internal processes and spreading these among specialist staff. In turn, it ensures the mechanisms are in place to ensure that research can be built on verifiable and credible data, thereby protecting the principles of good research practice and aligning collective efforts across the network of academic and professional services staff at the Institute. The upfront nature of efforts required of academics engaging with this process, combined with the thoughtful consideration of the structures, values and goals in the process of designing the new procedure meet the characteristics of a deep leverage point. They have the effect of providing a hostile environment for anyone either inclined to attempt scientific fraud, or unaware of the significance of fostering a culture of data sharing (Abson et al., 2017).
Another potent example of an initiative that attends to the conditions that create obstacles to good research practices, which also relates to research data management (RDM), is the creation of communities, which can communicate across institutions through mailing lists, such as the ELIXIR RDM Community. This community brings together RDM experts to develop ELIXIR’s vision and coordinate its activities in order to take advantage of the available knowledge and resources by working to overcome challenges to their harmonized dissemination and providing a dedicated forum in which to learn (D’Anna et al., 2024). In both these examples, substantial initial effort was required to yield long‑term sustainable change. In the case of the ELIXIR initiative, for instance, care was taken to ensure alignment with efforts of other significant stakeholders, such as the Research Data Alliance’s Professionalising Data Stewardship Interest Group, to ensure that all relevant and available insights were taken into account, in response to the lack of overview of the more general RDM ecosystem (D’Anna et al., 2024). Both efforts demonstrated a willingness to acknowledge and find ways to overcome significant barriers, including through investment in specialist roles and increasing training capacity.
Whilst these two examples demonstrate the value of heeding the approach encouraged in systems change of joining together disparate initiatives and disciplines, a key obstacle remains in the research environment as a whole, which pertains to the siloed nature of efforts to attend to complex issues and prevents joined‑up thinking. By making greater use of tools designed for network mapping that are inspired by systems change and standardizing and normalizing these maps, which I envisage will need to be dynamic, more individuals, working groups and committees can work in confidence that their energies and expertise are being fully utilized and maximizing their contribution to positive change.
Conclusion
While metascience relates to the critical analysis of scientific research and innovation systems, there is a current lack of attention addressing the field’s ambitions to the connections between responsible, open and innovative research. In this article, I have argued that tools developed in the context of systems thinking, which arose out of the need to find ways to manage complexity, bear significant potential to attend to this. Through examining the importance of systems thinking for the field, I identified some of the significant concepts and tools within systems thinking, such as toolkits for network mapping and concepts such as ‘leverage points’, which can contribute to accelerating social progress when seeking to improve inequity and implement assessment reform. I shared a recent example from the Francis Crick Institute showing how mapping and engaging all relevant stakeholders in designing and implementing a new research integrity procedure and normalizing greater effort at opportune times can drive its adoption and success. I highlighted resources and groups that act as leverage points within the research ecosystem, where access to knowledgeable peers and peer support in these areas can propel success.
Having considered some precise ways that systems thinking can help enable research to fulfil its potential, I argue that encouraging familiarity with the principles of systems thinking would enable researchers to have improved access to pre‑existing tools for reducing complexity and avoiding duplicating efforts. This would facilitate assurance that efforts are being effectively harnessed and directed accordingly. Such a foundation would help prevent wasting resources and provide a direction of shared travel, where local specialist knowledge can be put to use most effectively and the community can surpass siloed approaches. Research on research can fulfil its promise by ensuring that it builds on the shoulders of its theoretical predecessors in systems theory.
Although metascience is founded on the principle that the way to improve the systems, policies and processes of science is by applying the scientific method to their study, perhaps a revision of this purpose that appreciates the significance of the insights of systems thinking is required. While it is outside the scope of this article, an area that warrants further study is the nature of the history of the relationship between science and philosophy (Omodeo et al., 2019). Principles and insights taken from continental philosophy, particularly that which attends to the original closeness of the two disciplines in their origins, as well as the field of the philosophy of science, have significant potential to ensure that research achieves its function of strengthening civil society. Heeding these insights may invite us to cultivate a more holistic framework of thinking that escapes the siloes in which complex problems emerge and are exacerbated.
Funding
This work was supported by the Francis Crick Institute which receives its core funding from Cancer Research UK (CC0103), the UK Medical Research Council (CC0103) and the Wellcome Trust (CC0103).
Abbreviations and Acronyms
A list of the abbreviations and acronyms used in this and other Insights articles can be accessed here – click on the following URL and then select the ‘full list of industry A&As’ link: http://www.uksg.org/publications#aa.
Competing interests
At the time of writing, the author worked at the Francis Crick Institute on the Data Integrity procedure included as an example in the article.