The Centre for Machine Intelligence is pleased to highlight a significant new funding award for researchers from Sheffield’s Research Software Engineering (RSE) team.
Principal Investigator Dr Michael Foster and Co-Investigator Dr Edwin Brown, both members of the Sheffield RSE team, have secured £235,000 in UKRI funding through the Metascience Sandpit call for their project, "Paying it Forward". They are leading the initiative alongside co-investigators Matt Spick (University of Surrey), Daren Howell (Crew Create Ltd), and George Regkoukos (University College London). The University of Sheffield will receive £135,000 of the total grant.
Addressing the Shift in Academic Incentives
While artificial intelligence has accelerated data analysis and writing, current academic incentives favour fast productivity. This encourages rapid secondary analysis over the time-consuming creation of new primary resources, such as datasets and open-source software.
Without ongoing investment in these foundational digital tools, the resources that underpin UK scientific excellence risk being depleted. At present, funders and policymakers lack metrics to measure whether research communities are producing new assets, reusing existing ones, or upholding good digital stewardship under the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability).
Driving Long-Term Research Value
The Paying it Forward project will address this gap by developing new metascience metrics and scalable software tools. These tools will enable funders to:
- Quantify the balance between primary resource creation, reuse, and extension.
- Assess whether new software and data meet high digital stewardship standards.
- Conduct field-weighted tracking of research outputs across the UK landscape.
By providing clear evidence of how research resources are built and consumed, the project will help policymakers adapt incentive structures to ensure foundational software and data generation are properly recognised and rewarded