A new report by the European University Association provides guidance for reimagining academic career assessment with a set of case studies and recommendations.
On 14 January, the European University Association (EUA) published a new report on ‘Reimagining Academic Career Assessment: Stories of innovation and change’. EUA prepared the report in cooperation with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Scholarly Publishing and the Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Together with an online repository of case studies in responsible academic career assessment, the report shall provide inspiration for universities and other actors aspiring to improve their academic career assessment practices.
Responsible evaluation approaches for career assessment and recruitment in academia have gained in importance following the movement towards Open Science (OS), which breaks with traditional quantitative metrics, such as journal impact factors. The academic community protested against bad practices in this regard and developed guidelines and recommendations to improve the situation, resulting in DORA in 2013 and the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics in 2015. However, finding the right balance between qualitative and quantitative assessment approaches is not easy, as a study conducted by EUA with 260 European universities in 2019 showed. Around 75% of the interviewed universities still kept using the journal impact factor as a main criterion even for individual-level evaluations. A similar study on Open Science funder policies and practices by SPARC Europe also found that quantitative indicators including the H-index and journal impact factors are still used by some funders; some of the funders however, are using a more varied range of qualitative and quantitative criteria.
To help universities and other institutions handle the complexity involved with reviewing their assessment approaches, the discussion needs to move from declarations and high-level guidelines to concrete practice examples. This is where the new EUA report comes into play. The case studies provide potential pathways of change for institutions, which are already engaged in an assessment review process or are planning to do so. On the one hand, the report includes examples from single institutions’ policies and practices, on the other hand, it also shows a small number of studies on national consortia, where the main actors of a given country have joined forces to review assessment policies and practices.
The studies show a shared objective to develop a more holistic approach that incentivises and rewards a broader range of academic activities. They also share the longer-term goal to improve the academic culture at a particular institution or in a national system. In addition, the actors involved in implementing change often come in the form of a coalition of diverse stakeholders including libraries and human resources or dedicated working groups. Some of the activities are driven bottom-up by academics, while others are initiated top-down by institutional leadership. Or, there is a dynamic between the two forces driving the initiatives.
To conclude, the report offers recommendations supported by the collection of case studies. These include the proposition to go for open, accurate, transparent and responsible practices; to focus on raising awareness, community engagement and building capacity; and, to aim for institutional initiatives backed by a concerted approach.