Photo by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash.
By Seán Lacey
When I first enrolled in the SDG Academy’s online courses, I expected to deepen my understanding of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). What I did not expect was that they would fundamentally change the questions I began asking in my own professional practice.
I work in research governance, where much of my day-to-day work centres on research integrity, ethics, open research, and, more recently, research security and research assessment. Like many people working in this area, I was familiar with the SDGs as an important global framework. The SDG Academy courses, particularly The Age of Sustainable Development and Sustainable Cities, together with the Ages of Globalization Program for Higher Education, encouraged me to think differently. Rather than viewing the SDGs solely as outcomes of research, I began asking how the systems that support research either enable or constrain sustainable development.
That shift in perspective led to three opinion pieces, each examining a different part of the research ecosystem through an SDG lens: academic publishing, research security, and research assessment.
Academic Publishing
We often discuss publishing in terms of prestige, impact factors, or open access policies. Looking through the lens of sustainable development raised different questions. Who can afford to publish? Who can access research? How do publication models influence the equitable sharing of knowledge? These questions resulted in an opinion piece arguing that academic publishing should be viewed not only as a scholarly communication issue, but also as a sustainable development issue.
The published opinion piece on academic publishing can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2026.e181623.
Research Security
As governments and institutions respond to evolving geopolitical risks, research security has become an increasingly important area of research governance. Yet I found myself asking whether research security and the SDGs were necessarily in tension. Rather than treating openness and security as competing objectives, I explored how coordinated system leadership might enable research systems to protect legitimate national interests while maintaining international collaboration, inclusion, and responsible knowledge exchange.
The opinion piece on research security is currently under peer review and is available as a preprint here: https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/ytcun_v2.
Research Assessment
If the SDGs encourage us to maximise the societal value of research, then the ways we recognise and reward researchers also deserve attention. Research assessment shapes what is valued, what is funded, and ultimately what research is undertaken. Viewing assessment through the lens of sustainable development highlighted the importance of recognising behaviours and contributions that support long-term societal benefit alongside more traditional indicators of success.
The opinion piece on research assessment is also currently under peer review and is available as a preprint here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21014230.
Reflections
Looking back, I realised that these three opinion pieces were not independent works, but different perspectives on a common theme. They each considered a different component of the research system: how knowledge is shared, how it is protected, and how it is recognised. Together, they reflect a broader question about how research governance itself can better support sustainable development.
One of the strengths of the SDG Academy courses and the Ages of Globalization Program for Higher Education is that they encourage learners to apply the SDGs within their own professional contexts. For me, that meant looking beyond individual research projects and considering the wider structures that shape how research is conducted, communicated, and supported. That perspective continues to influence both my professional practice and my research.
The SDGs are often viewed as something researchers contribute to through their findings. My experience has been that they can also provide a valuable lens through which to examine and improve the research systems that make those discoveries possible.
Seán Lacey is the Research Integrity & Compliance Officer at Munster Technological University (Ireland), where he provides institutional leadership in research integrity, ethics, open research, research security, and research assessment. His work focuses on strengthening research governance through responsible, transparent, and sustainable approaches to research. He collaborates nationally and internationally on research governance initiatives and is the institutional lead for the implementation of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). Seán is also a Principal Fellow of Advance HE in recognition of his sustained strategic leadership in higher education. Originally trained in applied mathematics and statistics, his research increasingly explores how research governance can be better aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.
