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A report on the SSP Publisher-Funder Task Force's meeting of senior researchers, university administrators, funders, publishers, and representatives from other organizations on the topic of Responsible Research Assessment for the 21st Century.
France is now working with the European Commission and science and university associations to push for a new system of evaluating research in Europe, launching the Paris Call on research assessment.
LERU published a position paper “A Pathway towards Multidimensional Academic” to provide a LERU framework for assessing researchers careers. The report elaborates on three perspectives that form the basis of the framework for the assessment of research.
A number of national research organisations have been taken aback by the urgency of a request by the European Commission to appoint representatives to negotiate a new research assessment system in Europe.
Universities should reward more than research outputs.
The findings of this study indicate that geographical biases affect public perception of research and influence the results of grant competitions.
The focus on a narrow set of metrics leads to a lack of diversity in the types of leader and institution that win funding.
The SNSF's National Research Council decides whether or not to fund applications. The 89 evaluation panels handle the preparatory work on which it bases its decisions, assessing several thousand applications each year.
Academic CVs are ubiquitous and play an integral role in the assessment of researchers. They define and portray what activities and achievements are considered important in the scientific system.
The PREreview team is very excited to announce the publication of the Open Reviewer Toolkit, three guides to help with the unbiased composition and assessment of research manuscripts' review. The guides are openly available for download on Zenodo under CC-BY 4.0 license.
Australia’s ERA and EIA research assessment exercises lack a clearly defined purpose, or return on investment for Australian universities. In a climate of declining trust in the Australian Research Council, together with a confused idea about how research should be funded, the assessment regime itself is at a critical point of juncture.
The University of Liverpool is planning to make lay-offs on the basis of controversial measures. How should the global movement for responsible research respond?
A responsible research assessment would incentivise, reflect and reward the plural characteristics of high-quality research, in support of diverse and inclusive research cultures.
Systems for assessing scientists' work must properly account for a lost year of research - especially for female researchers.
The ability of researchers to raise funding is central to academic achievement. However, whether success in obtaining research funds correlates with the productivity, quality or impact of a researcher is debated. The study analyses 10 years of grant funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation in Earth and Environmental Sciences.
Nations the world over are increasingly turning to quantitative performance-based metrics to evaluate the quality of research outputs, as these metrics are abundant and provide an easy measure of ranking research. In 2010, the Danish Ministry of Science and Higher Education followed this trend and began portioning out a percentage of the available research funding according to how many research outputs each Danish university produces. Not all research outputs are eligible: only those published in a curated list of academic journals and publishers, the so-called BFI list, are included. The BFI list is ranked, which may create incentives for academic authors to target certain publication outlets or publication types over others. In this study we examine the potential effect these relatively new research evaluation methods have had on the publication patterns of researchers in Denmark. The study finds that publication behaviors in the Natural Sciences & Technology, Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) have changed, while the Health Sciences appear unaffected. Researchers in Natural Sciences & Technology appear to focus on high impact journals that reap more BFI points. While researchers in SSH have also increased their focus on the impact of the publication outlet, they also appear to have altered their preferred publication types, publishing more journal articles in the Social Sciences and more anthologies in the Humanities.
Open science means action. And the way we offer recognition and reward to academics and staff is key in bringing about the transition that we aim for.
A better balance between teaching and research duties, greater recognition of team performances and the elimination of simplistic assessment criteria would improve the systems of recognition and rewards in academia.
Part one of a four part series on major barriers to equitable decision-making in hiring, review, promotion, and tenure processes that commonly result from biased thinking in academia. Part one delves into objective comparisons.
Abstract. The research policy (RP) arena has been transforming in recent years, turning into a policy mix encompassing the diversity of policy instruments embe
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has adopted a randomised process for whittling down the applications which were already deemed strong enough to be considered for funding.
Universities and research funders are increasingly reconsidering the relevance and importance of researchers' contributions when assessing them for hiring, promotion or funding.
Research organisations need to be able to identify which proposals are the best for funding, and which researchers should be appointed or promoted. Science Europe has collated a set of policy recommendations to ensure that assessments of research quality are effective, efficient, and fair.
Information for Wellcome-funded organisations on how to implement responsible and fair approaches for research assessment that meet the expectations set out in Wellcome's open access policy 2021.
DORA launched a new virtual discussion series for public and private research funders. The goal of the series is to increase communication about research assessment reform by providing a space for funders to share and discuss new initiatives, with the hope that this will ultimately serve as a platform to accelerate the spread of good research assessment policies and practices.
Citations are ubiquitous in evaluating research, but how exactly they relate to what they are thought to measure is unclear. This article investigates the relationships between citations, quality, and impact using a survey with an embedded experiment.
Researchers are used to being evaluated based on indices like the impact factors of the scientific journals in which they publish papers and their number of citations. A team of 14 natural scientists from nine countries are now rebelling against this practice, arguing that obsessive use of indices is damaging the quality of science.
Alison Mudditt looks at the recently released TOP Factor from the Center for Open Science, and the bigger picture of shifting the nature of research assessment.
Altmetrics have been an important topic in the context of open science for some time.
Academics can excel in many areas, but thus far they have primarily been assessed based on research achievements. From now on, the public knowledge institutions and research funders want to consider academics' knowledge and expertise more broadly in determining career policy and grant requirements.
