Tri-council exploring new mechanisms to promote interdisciplinary research

Canada’s three federal research funders are promising new mechanisms to encourage interdisciplinary research, but speakers at the recent RE$EARCH MONEY conference cautioned there are still significant barriers to overcome.

Ted Hewitt, who chairs the tri-agency Canada Research Coordinating Committee, said overcoming these barriers “is one of the things the CRCC is meant to try to crack” as it prepares to launch additional programs later this year.

The CRCC saw the challenges first hand with its inaugural competition to support early career researchers under the New Frontiers in Research Fund – which aims to support high-risk, high-reward and interdisciplinary research. One of the big hurdles they identified was peer review.

“No matter how we encourage applications that cross disciplinary boundaries, we have to put them in front of peer reviewers,” said Hewitt, president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). “People tend to move or gravitate immediately to deep disciplinary approaches, which is the killer of most interdisciplinary research.”

Other panelists noted that even the definition of interdisciplinary research is hard to nail down. Under the New Frontiers fund, proposed research projects had to include elements from at least two different disciplines.

Hewitt stressed that interdisciplinary research “is really about what makes the best sense in coming at a problem. Who do you need to bring to the table and how will they work together?” He stressed that for the CRCC, collaborations have to be “meaningful—not add-ons, not box-ticking.”

Stefan Leslie, executive director of Marine Environmental Observation, Prediction and Response Network (MEOPAR), a Network of Centres of Excellence, said one way to foster interdisciplinary research is to consult the community.

Let the problem drive the research

“What problems do they wish to solve? What opportunities do they see? What risks do they want to manage? What would be of value to them? That is going to create, almost by definition, a research team that is going to have to take an interdisciplinary approach to resolve a problem,” he said. “Then, evaluating its quality comes down to whether that research is effectively applied to that problem.”

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Earlier this year, MEOPAR launched the Fathom Fund, a new co-funding model designed to encourage researchers to engage with their community. Participating researchers must raise the first 25% of costs through a crowdfunding campaign.

Incentives, metrics and success stories are key

Panelist Chelsea Gabel, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Well-Being, Community Engagement, and Innovation at McMaster University, called on universities and funding agencies to rethink the incentive structures for interdisciplinary research and how they measure impact, especially for Indigenous researchers who often work with communities who would directly benefit from research that may not be published in academic journals.

“A lot of scholars—including indigenous researchers and researchers from other marginalized communities—are scared to take on this kind of research because the metrics for measuring the outputs associated with it [i.e., scientific papers] remain underdeveloped. As a result, it might not benefit our academic careers,” she said.

Marie Franquin, a Ph.D. student at McGill University and co-president of the Science & Policy Exchange, offered two recommendations to encourage the next-generation of researchers to undertake interdisciplinary projects.

First, share the success stories. Early career researchers need to see the results of interdisciplinary research, she said. Second, target interdisciplinary research funding at students. Doing so, she noted, would encourage them to conduct cross-cutting research in the future and also prepare them for careers outside of academia.

CFI embracing convergence

Moderator Roseann O’Reilly Runte, president and CEO of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, said universities and colleges are embracing convergence, which the CFI defines as “going beyond interdisciplinary research by bringing many fields of research together, eliminating silos and creating systematic cohesion and thinking."

Budget 2018 included $763 million over five years for research infrastructure through the CFI. In response, last November the CFI launched a pan-Canadian consultation on the future of research and research infrastructure, including how it could catalyze research through greater convergence of disciplines. A summary of findings and proposed actions will be published in June 2019.

In the meantime, O’Reilly Runte said the response from the research community regarding convergence was overwhelming. “They said, ‘We do it, we love it, we support it. It’s the way of the future.”

Post-secondary institutions also had some advice for CFI: "They told us, 'Don’t put any rules around us because you’ll spoil our creativity and innovation. So, tell us that it’s good, support us in doing it, and give us free rein.'”

"We can do that," said O’Reilly Runte.

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