FREEDOM TO GROW & EXPLORE
COMMUNITY & CONNECTION
INCLUSIVITY & THRIVING ON DIFFERENCE
OPENNESS, INTEGRITY & RESPONSIBILITY
Our Research Culture Roadmap 2026-2031
Our approach to developing the roadmap
Explore the interactive image to find more out about our four themes
Where are we going?
Research Culture at the University of Warwick
Working with our community, we have co-created a shared vision, mission and set of commitments with clear strategic objectives across four themes: connections, growth, inclusivity, and integrity. Each theme is underpinned by practical commitments that translate ambition into tangible change, which will inform how we track progress over time. Vision A thriving research community in which people are supported to be their best as they deliver excellence in research which changes lives and society for the better. Mission To work collaboratively with colleagues from across our research ecosystem to build a research culture where people thrive through connection, curiosity, and integrity.
Our approach to developing the roadmap
Delivering the roadmap
Explore our research culture action plan
Community engagement
Research Culture at the University of Warwick
What is research culture?
Thinking differently about the research journey Enhancing research culture requires us to ‘think differently’ about the research journey - how research is developed, shared, delivered, and implemented - and how this is influenced by a complex interplay of external, institutional, and research-specific factors. Recent years have seen a remarkable evolution in both our understanding of ‘what matters’ when seeking to improve research culture and how change can be achieved. At the University of Warwick, we value connection, collaboration and co-creation across the community in helping us to understand ‘what matters’ on the journey to research excellence. Moreover, such active involvement seeks to ensure that we understand how change can be meaningfully instituted and ‘measured’ in a way that resonates and further enhances understanding and development. Through active engagement with people across our community, we have sought to understand and unpack some of the complexities and interdependencies of research culture into actionable, transferable initiatives that can result in real, meaningful change. Through continued community engagement, our goal is to achieve a future where an inclusive, responsive, and positive research culture is embedded in all that we do – ensuring that we continue to support excellence in our people and our research.
What is research culture? A sustainable and positive research culture isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ – it is essential to a thriving community in which people are supported to be their best as they deliver excellence in research which changes lives and society for the better. The culture within which we work influences how (and perhaps why) we work, our career pathways, access to collaborative opportunities, and ultimately the research we produce. Innovative, impactful and inclusive research can only be sustained if we have the culture in place to support it. Research culture is a multi-faceted concept, underpinned by personal and professional behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes and norms. Put simply, it embraces everything a researcher or research enabler does that isn’t the research!
Our journey so far Over the last 13-years, Warwick’s demonstrable commitment to enhancing research culture has been evidenced through a range of innovative activities, providing a strong foundation for future progress. In 2022, research culture was formally embedded as a core pillar of the University’s Research Strategy, affirming the integral role of positive research culture in delivering world-leading, sustainable, and impactful research. This also reflected a growing national recognition of the vital contribution of positive research culture towards the achievement of research excellence. Moving forward, articulating a clear and ambitious vision which reflects our shared values, supports all members of our research community, and continues to drive meaningful change is essential. Through an active and sustained collaboration with members of our research community, the new roadmap and action plan will co-define our commitments and aspirations, outline how we will achieve them, and establish mechanisms to monitor progress and impact which resonates with our community. In 2025, we compiled a report of our journey to date, view our Research Culture: A Progress Review 2025
Who is our research community? Our research community is broad and diverse, encompassing everyone who contributes to the design, development, delivery, implementation, and sharing of research at the University of Warwick. This includes researchers at all career stages, postgraduate and undergraduate research students, technicians, research professionals, professional services colleagues, and patients and the public who work within and/or contribute to research and research environments as active, collaborative partners. By recognising the value of every role and contribution, we aim to build a culture where all members of our community feel connected, respected, supported and empowered to thrive.
Who is our research community?
Thinking differently about the research journey
Our journey so far
Our approach to developing the roadmap
Engaging our research community Creating a positive research culture is not just an aspiration. At the University of Warwick, we recognise that culture shapes the experiences of everyone involved in research and underpins the quality and impact of our work. To ensure our roadmap reflects the needs and ambitions of our community, we adopted a collaborative approach grounded in Theory of Change principles, which helped us define the outcomes we wanted to achieve, and the steps required to get there. This approach values inclusivity and co-creation, bringing together diverse voices from across the University’s research ecosystem to clarify what we mean by research culture, identify priorities, and determine how we will measure progress.
Between June and December 2025, we ran a series of activities to gather feedback from across Warwick’s research community. These conversations helped us understand what we were doing well and where improvements were needed, forming the foundation of our roadmap and action plan for 2026–2031.
Engagement activities included:
Institutional Survey To capture a broad range of perspectives, we also launched an institutional survey (accessible between June – August 2025). 795 responses provided essential baseline data on what a good research culture looks like, what we are doing well, and helping to prioritise where we need to improve. This evidence has helped us to guide priority actions and measure progress.
Alignment with the University values and concordats Finally, to ensure coherence and strategic alignment, we have mapped our research culture priorities against the wider institutional framework - University values, core strategies, the Research Strategy, and our various concordats and commitments. This approach ensures that each aspect of our research culture work complements existing policies, sector frameworks, and disciplinary initiatives, creating a unified direction of travel.
Strategic Workshops
Strategic Workshops We held three Research Culture Strategy workshops in June, July and October 2025, which brought together over 45 strategic representatives from faculties, schools, and departments to ensure high-level input into the formation of our research culture aims and commitments.
Community Workshops In June 2025, we hosted two research community workshops, one online and one in person, engaging more than 40 people from across the research community. These sessions invited contributions from different roles, including postgraduate researchers, technicians, research enablers, and professional services colleagues, to co-create priorities and commitments for the roadmap.
Community Workshops
Institutional Survey
Alignment with the University values and concordats
Delivering the roadmap
Incorporating a Theory of Change (ToC) into the development and delivery of the roadmap provides an evidence-based framework which connects community-derived needs, barriers, and challenges to actions and activities intended to address them, to meaningful outputs and outcomes, and relevant, accessible, and feasible indicators. By making these connections more transparent across the four core themes, the TOC provides a shared framework and action plan for understanding how proposed activities can lead to meaningful impact over the short, medium, and longer-term. It also ensures that we adapt responsibly as we learn what works in practice
Explore our research culture action plan
The Research Culture Enablers Network at Warwick (RCEN@Warwick)
Community engagement has been central to the co-creation of the Warwick Research Culture Roadmap and will remain so throughout its delivery and evolution. Culture change is not a quick fix, and many issues don’t have easy solutions. Successful delivery of the roadmap and action plan at departmental, faculty, and institutional levels will therefore require collaboration and a willingness to be agile in response to changes. This will be facilitated and supported through Research Culture Enablers Network at Warwick (RCEN@Warwick). RCEN@Warwick is a new community of practice designed to act as a driving force for advancing and enhancing research culture across the institution. RCEN@Warwick will support colleagues from across the University’s research ecosystem to connect and collaborate on taking forward the commitments and activities captured in the roadmap. Operating as a University-wide working group, it will ensure that positive change is not only initiated but actively progressed and sustained over time. Progress on the roadmap will be reported on through the University Research Committee governance structure. Through continued engagement we will ensure that the evolution of our community’s story is understood, that activities, outcomes, and indicators remain relevant, gaps are identified, and the shared goals of the roadmap are successfully delivered.
RCEN@Warwick
Community and Connection
Strategic objective: We will foster a connected and vibrant research culture where collaboration and shared purpose drives excellence.
Create meaningful opportunities for connection and space to build relationships, learn from others, share ideas, and co-create research.
Support staff to build mutually beneficial partnerships with a diverse range of stakeholders and communities.
Connect people and ideas to showcase, share and shape good practice in research culture through local, national and international initiatives.
Champion collaboration across and between disciplines to innovate and tackle complex challenges.
Openness, Integrity and Responsibility
Strategic objective: Our research culture will be grounded in socially responsible research, promoting openness, integrity and accountability.
Foster shared responsibility for upholding high ethical standards and striving for good practice in research integrity, embedding streamlined, coherent policies and processes, and tailored training and support.
Promote responsible and sustainable (social, economic, environmental) research and innovation, ensuring appropriate oversight and external regulatory compliance.
Develop and continually improve robust governance frameworks, with efficient ethics systems that enable proactive risk management and build trust.
Equip researchers with the necessary training, shared understanding, and infrastructure to support data sharing and reproducibility.
Equip researchers with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to support fairness and encourage appropriate recognition of contributions to both traditional and non-traditional outputs.
Freedom to Grow and Explore
Strategic objective: We will empower our research community to break new ground, valuing curiosity and creativity.
Support and champion diverse career pathways and ambitions across the research community.
Provide meaningful and accessible development opportunities across career stages.
Encourage and celebrate excellence in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, encouraging curiosity to drive impactful discoveries.
Cultivate a supportive environment where setbacks and resilience are explored openly and constructively.
Inclusivity and Thriving on Difference
Strategic objective: We will build equitable and inclusive research communities where everyone can thrive and feel valued.
Align structures and behaviours to support inclusion and accountability, embedding clear expectations about conduct within our research environments.
Ensure equitable and sustainable wellbeing support for the research community.
Require research leaders at all levels to embed inclusive practices and champion wellbeing within their areas of responsibility.
Recognise and value diversity in experience, skills and contributions across all career pathways.
Actively listen to diverse voices through ongoing community engagement to cultivate belonging.
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Transcript
FREEDOM TO GROW & EXPLORE
COMMUNITY & CONNECTION
INCLUSIVITY & THRIVING ON DIFFERENCE
OPENNESS, INTEGRITY & RESPONSIBILITY
Our Research Culture Roadmap 2026-2031
Our approach to developing the roadmap
Explore the interactive image to find more out about our four themes
Where are we going?
Research Culture at the University of Warwick
Working with our community, we have co-created a shared vision, mission and set of commitments with clear strategic objectives across four themes: connections, growth, inclusivity, and integrity. Each theme is underpinned by practical commitments that translate ambition into tangible change, which will inform how we track progress over time. Vision A thriving research community in which people are supported to be their best as they deliver excellence in research which changes lives and society for the better. Mission To work collaboratively with colleagues from across our research ecosystem to build a research culture where people thrive through connection, curiosity, and integrity.
Our approach to developing the roadmap
Delivering the roadmap
Explore our research culture action plan
Community engagement
Research Culture at the University of Warwick
What is research culture?
Thinking differently about the research journey Enhancing research culture requires us to ‘think differently’ about the research journey - how research is developed, shared, delivered, and implemented - and how this is influenced by a complex interplay of external, institutional, and research-specific factors. Recent years have seen a remarkable evolution in both our understanding of ‘what matters’ when seeking to improve research culture and how change can be achieved. At the University of Warwick, we value connection, collaboration and co-creation across the community in helping us to understand ‘what matters’ on the journey to research excellence. Moreover, such active involvement seeks to ensure that we understand how change can be meaningfully instituted and ‘measured’ in a way that resonates and further enhances understanding and development. Through active engagement with people across our community, we have sought to understand and unpack some of the complexities and interdependencies of research culture into actionable, transferable initiatives that can result in real, meaningful change. Through continued community engagement, our goal is to achieve a future where an inclusive, responsive, and positive research culture is embedded in all that we do – ensuring that we continue to support excellence in our people and our research.
What is research culture? A sustainable and positive research culture isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ – it is essential to a thriving community in which people are supported to be their best as they deliver excellence in research which changes lives and society for the better. The culture within which we work influences how (and perhaps why) we work, our career pathways, access to collaborative opportunities, and ultimately the research we produce. Innovative, impactful and inclusive research can only be sustained if we have the culture in place to support it. Research culture is a multi-faceted concept, underpinned by personal and professional behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes and norms. Put simply, it embraces everything a researcher or research enabler does that isn’t the research!
Our journey so far Over the last 13-years, Warwick’s demonstrable commitment to enhancing research culture has been evidenced through a range of innovative activities, providing a strong foundation for future progress. In 2022, research culture was formally embedded as a core pillar of the University’s Research Strategy, affirming the integral role of positive research culture in delivering world-leading, sustainable, and impactful research. This also reflected a growing national recognition of the vital contribution of positive research culture towards the achievement of research excellence. Moving forward, articulating a clear and ambitious vision which reflects our shared values, supports all members of our research community, and continues to drive meaningful change is essential. Through an active and sustained collaboration with members of our research community, the new roadmap and action plan will co-define our commitments and aspirations, outline how we will achieve them, and establish mechanisms to monitor progress and impact which resonates with our community. In 2025, we compiled a report of our journey to date, view our Research Culture: A Progress Review 2025
Who is our research community? Our research community is broad and diverse, encompassing everyone who contributes to the design, development, delivery, implementation, and sharing of research at the University of Warwick. This includes researchers at all career stages, postgraduate and undergraduate research students, technicians, research professionals, professional services colleagues, and patients and the public who work within and/or contribute to research and research environments as active, collaborative partners. By recognising the value of every role and contribution, we aim to build a culture where all members of our community feel connected, respected, supported and empowered to thrive.
Who is our research community?
Thinking differently about the research journey
Our journey so far
Our approach to developing the roadmap
Engaging our research community Creating a positive research culture is not just an aspiration. At the University of Warwick, we recognise that culture shapes the experiences of everyone involved in research and underpins the quality and impact of our work. To ensure our roadmap reflects the needs and ambitions of our community, we adopted a collaborative approach grounded in Theory of Change principles, which helped us define the outcomes we wanted to achieve, and the steps required to get there. This approach values inclusivity and co-creation, bringing together diverse voices from across the University’s research ecosystem to clarify what we mean by research culture, identify priorities, and determine how we will measure progress.
Between June and December 2025, we ran a series of activities to gather feedback from across Warwick’s research community. These conversations helped us understand what we were doing well and where improvements were needed, forming the foundation of our roadmap and action plan for 2026–2031.
Engagement activities included:
Institutional Survey To capture a broad range of perspectives, we also launched an institutional survey (accessible between June – August 2025). 795 responses provided essential baseline data on what a good research culture looks like, what we are doing well, and helping to prioritise where we need to improve. This evidence has helped us to guide priority actions and measure progress.
Alignment with the University values and concordats Finally, to ensure coherence and strategic alignment, we have mapped our research culture priorities against the wider institutional framework - University values, core strategies, the Research Strategy, and our various concordats and commitments. This approach ensures that each aspect of our research culture work complements existing policies, sector frameworks, and disciplinary initiatives, creating a unified direction of travel.
Strategic Workshops
Strategic Workshops We held three Research Culture Strategy workshops in June, July and October 2025, which brought together over 45 strategic representatives from faculties, schools, and departments to ensure high-level input into the formation of our research culture aims and commitments.
Community Workshops In June 2025, we hosted two research community workshops, one online and one in person, engaging more than 40 people from across the research community. These sessions invited contributions from different roles, including postgraduate researchers, technicians, research enablers, and professional services colleagues, to co-create priorities and commitments for the roadmap.
Community Workshops
Institutional Survey
Alignment with the University values and concordats
Delivering the roadmap
Incorporating a Theory of Change (ToC) into the development and delivery of the roadmap provides an evidence-based framework which connects community-derived needs, barriers, and challenges to actions and activities intended to address them, to meaningful outputs and outcomes, and relevant, accessible, and feasible indicators. By making these connections more transparent across the four core themes, the TOC provides a shared framework and action plan for understanding how proposed activities can lead to meaningful impact over the short, medium, and longer-term. It also ensures that we adapt responsibly as we learn what works in practice
Explore our research culture action plan
The Research Culture Enablers Network at Warwick (RCEN@Warwick)
Community engagement has been central to the co-creation of the Warwick Research Culture Roadmap and will remain so throughout its delivery and evolution. Culture change is not a quick fix, and many issues don’t have easy solutions. Successful delivery of the roadmap and action plan at departmental, faculty, and institutional levels will therefore require collaboration and a willingness to be agile in response to changes. This will be facilitated and supported through Research Culture Enablers Network at Warwick (RCEN@Warwick). RCEN@Warwick is a new community of practice designed to act as a driving force for advancing and enhancing research culture across the institution. RCEN@Warwick will support colleagues from across the University’s research ecosystem to connect and collaborate on taking forward the commitments and activities captured in the roadmap. Operating as a University-wide working group, it will ensure that positive change is not only initiated but actively progressed and sustained over time. Progress on the roadmap will be reported on through the University Research Committee governance structure. Through continued engagement we will ensure that the evolution of our community’s story is understood, that activities, outcomes, and indicators remain relevant, gaps are identified, and the shared goals of the roadmap are successfully delivered.
RCEN@Warwick
Community and Connection
Strategic objective: We will foster a connected and vibrant research culture where collaboration and shared purpose drives excellence.
Create meaningful opportunities for connection and space to build relationships, learn from others, share ideas, and co-create research.
Support staff to build mutually beneficial partnerships with a diverse range of stakeholders and communities.
Connect people and ideas to showcase, share and shape good practice in research culture through local, national and international initiatives.
Champion collaboration across and between disciplines to innovate and tackle complex challenges.
Openness, Integrity and Responsibility
Strategic objective: Our research culture will be grounded in socially responsible research, promoting openness, integrity and accountability.
Foster shared responsibility for upholding high ethical standards and striving for good practice in research integrity, embedding streamlined, coherent policies and processes, and tailored training and support.
Promote responsible and sustainable (social, economic, environmental) research and innovation, ensuring appropriate oversight and external regulatory compliance.
Develop and continually improve robust governance frameworks, with efficient ethics systems that enable proactive risk management and build trust.
Equip researchers with the necessary training, shared understanding, and infrastructure to support data sharing and reproducibility.
Equip researchers with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to support fairness and encourage appropriate recognition of contributions to both traditional and non-traditional outputs.
Freedom to Grow and Explore
Strategic objective: We will empower our research community to break new ground, valuing curiosity and creativity.
Support and champion diverse career pathways and ambitions across the research community.
Provide meaningful and accessible development opportunities across career stages.
Encourage and celebrate excellence in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, encouraging curiosity to drive impactful discoveries.
Cultivate a supportive environment where setbacks and resilience are explored openly and constructively.
Inclusivity and Thriving on Difference
Strategic objective: We will build equitable and inclusive research communities where everyone can thrive and feel valued.
Align structures and behaviours to support inclusion and accountability, embedding clear expectations about conduct within our research environments.
Ensure equitable and sustainable wellbeing support for the research community.
Require research leaders at all levels to embed inclusive practices and champion wellbeing within their areas of responsibility.
Recognise and value diversity in experience, skills and contributions across all career pathways.
Actively listen to diverse voices through ongoing community engagement to cultivate belonging.