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[Music] so welcome everyone to this first era talk and today we are going to talk about a very important topic which is research assessment so the way in which we assess research and researchers is fundamental for the well functioning of our research and innovation systems and it also has an important impact on the practices and as well the decision that we make in research so is research assessment incentivizing to do research in the right way today or what are the shortcomings that we see and the challenges and possible solutions and changes that we need to affect so today we're going to discuss these with you guests but before we dive into this discussion let's first hear what the new european research area is doing for supporting the reform of research assessment and now i pass the floor to a colleague of mine javier who is going to explain to us what the era is doing in this area today research assessment is often dominated by a few narrow indicators the quantity of publications and the prestige of the venues where these publications are published but researchers contributions are much more than this we need to better value the diversity of outputs activities and practices that contribute to the quality and impact of research for instance researchers produce not only publications but they also do data sets workflows softwares and many other different contributions also team science and collaboration requires a better recognition of the different roles that researchers take in the research activity the era action on research assessment has two main strengths the first is to create a coalition of organizations committed to effect changes and to mutually learn from each other as the coalition members implement and test new approaches the second is to analyze legal and administrative barriers at the national level so that national framework conditions are conducive to changes so thank you to my colleague javier for illustrating how this era policy action is contributing to the reform of research assessment and we are now in the studio with two excellent guests that i'm very lucky to have with me today so let me introduce them to you so first i would like to welcome noemi oberbon so nuemio berboni is a postdoctoral researcher at the university of hasselt in belgium and also at amsterdam university medical centers and she's joining me here in the studio and we have virtually an online as well i have the pleasure to introduce to you thomas suzy who is associate professor at the university of vienna in austria so welcome to you both to the discussion and thank you for having accepted our invitation i know both of you have been very much involved in the past months in this co-creation process that is leading towards the adoption of an agreement or reforming research assessment so let me ask you the first question so is uh that it is why is a reform of research assessment needed is there a problem today and i'm gonna turn to nuemi first to answer this question thank you sylvia so is there a problem of research assessment today absolutely there's a lot of issues with research assessments at the moment a lot of it resides in the fact that we assess researchers mostly on a very narrow set of metrics and these metrics are very limited in what they look at so for example publications how many papers researchers publish where they publish these papers so what's the journal impact factor of the journal where they publish these papers also citations and so mostly focusing on the publications that researchers have in the end of their research so really the outputs and the publication process so this is problematic for a number of reasons one of them is because then it it pushes researchers to really focus on the publications and not on the rest of their research but there's a lot of other activities that are extremely important in research for example peer review for example mentoring and supervision all these things are not captured in current research assessments so that's hugely problematic so you have been both involved very much in the co-creation of an agreement or reforming research assessment and why it's in your opinion it is important that organizations agree to work together towards reforming research assessment this is of course an important goal and and collaboration in this area is crucial so why do you think it's important the organization agreed to work together yeah so there is increasing recognition and has been for a long time but we need to move away from prestige from this impact factor and these oversimplified metrics but there's been much less agreement on what we should do instead we can we know what we don't want but we haven't been able to come to an agreement what we want but the problem is that research assessment is a systemic issue it's really hard for any one actor to move first so if for example i as a researcher refused to publish in these prestigious journals i may not have a career and that's certainly not the way to change the system so what we need is a coordinated action from a range of different stakeholders from funders universities researcher groups learn societies everybody needs to act together and this is exactly what this coalition for reforming research assessment aims to achieve collective agreement and principles collective action on reform but without trying to impose one-size-fit solutions which which won't work so this leads naturally to another question because if there is a massive uptake of this agreement and organization sign and our enthusiast in implementing it which we hope will be the case so what will concretely change for researchers in a reformed system um so as a researcher i can say that i mean i really want research assessment to change i really want this reform to happen because i think that it will allow me and all of the other researchers to follow uh good science practices so it's at the moment we have a bit of attention where i'm often faced with the decision should i pursue should i do something to advance my career or should i do something to advance science it's always very challenging and then sometimes when you decide to to pursue something to help science well you know that your career you might not get the next grant so it's it we're always facing this tension and i hope that by reforming research assessment we will get rid of this tension entirely so when we advance science when we do our best to create rigorous open and transparent research we will be recognized for that so thomas any reaction from your side on this in a reform system each researcher can bring their unique talents to the research effort and be valued for the unique contributions to the research and research is always a team effort current system just don't really take that into account on how we evaluate and for individuals there's pressure to get published in these glamorous journals so less stress better mental health and more robust and reproducible research there is more room for diversity for creativity and for better research that benefits us all we don't have to simply publish our berries that is actually a choice that we can make as a research community and the last thing i would add that the reformed system is not something that that will be imposed top down on researchers myself and other researchers in this team have have pushed very hard to make sure that in the agreement we said we we make it very clear that researchers should be directly involved in planning and implementing the reforms so whatever system we come up with in in a specific discipline in a specific university or country the researchers who will be evaluated should and will be part of planning and implementing these important reforms thank you very much very important points and i think from my side i'm really convinced about the need of this and it's so clear from what you have illustrated to us about the need to really join the agreement and to make all collectively efforts in a systemic manner among all stakeholders to make this possible and to realize these changes but if you should have the opportunity to talk to organization today and say to them why should you sign the agreement what would be your message to them and and thomas what would be your message to this organization why they should sign believe it or not no one ever decided that the way we currently evaluate research is ideal or even desirable we've just ended up with this dysfunctional system this agreement is the first real chance for the research community to reclaim control of research assessment and to decide for ourselves how we wish to evaluate and reward research and researchers so let us just come together and take this chance and and make this reform a reality annoy me any final message from you regarding this yeah so this agreement is very important in my opinion it's putting a lot of organization a lot of different stakeholders together and i think by signing the agreement you make a statement so you make a statement that you actually care about research that you care also about researchers and the people who perform research but the agreement also goes beyond just making a statement and i think this is the great strength of this agreement it goes into action and by signing the agreement you join a coalition of people who will help one another who will build in mutual learning to actually put their commitments into action yeah this is really a very important message now it's time to conclude this era talk we had a really super exciting and very interesting conversations so i just wanted to thank very much nuemi and thomas for their participation and reminding all our listeners today that actually they can follow our twitter account so they wish to stay more in touch with the next developments on this topic and as well to follow our youtube channel because this is one of the many actually era talks that we are going to have on the different era policy actions and so stay tuned in our youtube channel to watch any future era talks on other important research and innovation subjects so thank you very much [Music] you