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For keen observers of the science policy scene, the most eye-catching announcement in last week’s government response to Nurse 2.0 (or The Independent Review of the UK’s Research, Development and Innovation Organisational Landscape, to give its formal title) was the launch of a new metascience unit.

Headed by Ben Steyn —a rising star in  the Department of Science Innovation and Technology’s (DSIT) ranks, who was part of the start-up team for the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) and has a PhD in the philosophy of science and technology—the new unit will work across DSIT and UKRI, with an initial budget of £10m to conduct experiments, test and evaluate the effectiveness of new approaches to research and innovation funding.

This is a bold and encouraging move, which signals DSIT’s ambition to operate at the vanguard of a growing movement for more sophisticated and systematic uses of evidence in research policy and funding.

And while there is now a scattering of metascientific initiatives and centres in universities, think tanks and funding agencies across Europe and the United States—my Research on Research Institute (RoRI) among them—it makes the UK the first country in the world to give metascience a formal institutional berth in government. If it weren’t profoundly un-metascientific, one might say we’re now on track to becoming a “metascience superpower”.

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