King’s College London is committed to providing the best environment in which to carry out your research and ensure that our staff and students are equipped to make the most of their abilities and potential.
As such, King's has developed a number of policies to ensure that research at King's is carried out to the highest possible standards. See below to find details of our policy relating to different areas.
College Research Committee
The College Research Committee is the committee of the Academic Board responsible for advising the Board on quality assurance and regulatory issues, on the sharing of good practice and on the development of College policy affecting research. Click here for meeting dates, terms of reference and membership of the research committee.
The Research Staff Representative Committee
The committee is instrumental in making sure research staff across King's and their concerns are represented. Raising the profile of research staff as a vital and distinct community within King's and ensure that their views reflected in institutional policies and decision making at faculty and university level. The RSRC's work also informs various other committees, including Faculty Athena SWAN committees, research committees, and the UK Research Staff Association.
REF 2021
The Research Excellence Framework is the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. The next assessment was due to take place in November 2020, however, it has been put on hold for future notice due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For more information on our preparations for REF 2021 and GDPR notice for Impact Case Study evidence collection, please click here.
Research involving human participants
All research involving human participants, undertaken by university staff and students, must have ethical approval. Click to find out how King's maintains the highest ethical standards for its research.
Research involving animals
The Biological Services Unit provide facilities, services and advice for all research scientists within King's who need to carry out research using animals. Click here to read more about King's policy on the use of animals in scientific research.
HEFCE and the other three UK funding bodies have published details of a new policy for open access for the REF2021. The policy requires that journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN accepted for publication after 1 April 2016 must be made open access by depositing full-text papers into an online repository to be eligible for the post-2014 REF. Click here to go to the Open Access pages.
King's College London is dedicated to ensuring research data created and used within the university is managed and curated to the highest standards throughout its lifecycle, and with due regard to relevant legislation on access and privacy, and the possibility of beneficial re-use. Click here to go to the Research Data Management pages.
Research funders require recipients of grants to provide information on outcomes of research in order to demonstrate the value and impact of publicly funded research. Research Councils UK, NIHR and several major charities have harmonised their data collection to an online system called Researchfish. Click here for information about how to use the system (internal).
For King's staff
King's staff can find further information about research policy and governance on our internal pages.
Research staff on fixed-term contracts
Read FAQs and access King's policy on employing staff on fixed-term contracts.