Question
To ask Her Majesty's Government further to the Written Answers by Lord Drayson on 20 April (WA 329–30) regarding the disproportionate cost of analysing many hundreds of journals worldwide, whether recipients of funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC) are required to report their research publications.
Answer
The Medical Research Council (MRC) requires that all researchers in receipt of funding report their publications to the MRC. Historically this has been via a variety of different means, and the information is not consistently available. The MRC is currently developing an online system to collect publication data directly from all researchers, but this is still in development. All recipients of MRC funding are required to acknowledge in their research publications that they have received funding from the MRC. This has been in a variety of different ways, making the systematic collection of these data difficult, and the MRC is working with publishers and researchers to address this issue. The MRC, in partnership with the other research councils, the UK's three national libraries and four national higher education funding bodies, also supports the Research Information Network which issued guidelines in 2008 for the standardised acknowledgement of funding source. Due to the variability of information available in research publications and in the final grant report submitted by researchers, the MRC has recently piloted a new annual survey of research outputs. This survey, which will be launched during 2009, aims to collect information relating to the outcomes and outputs of all research supported by the MRC from 2007 onwards.