Overview.
The 2nd CRUP/CRUE Open Science Seminar had the topic “Career Assessment in the transition to Open Science”. The conference was organized by the Working Group of Open Science from CRUE and the Expert Group on Open Science of the European University Association, coordinated by the Council of Rectors of Portuguese (CRUP) and Spanish universities (CRUE). The main objective is promoting the transition to Open Science in Spanish and Portuguese Universities.
Collaborations between different scientific disciplines, together to the needed of the society is crucial to achieve the total transition to Open Science.
The Dutch approach want to enhance the task of what changing in recognition and rewards ensuring that academia continue to be connected to the society, and that the general public continues to support academia. Moreover, the Dutch approach want to make the best use of all our talent and ensure that scientists work in healthy work-environments. The growth to Open Science is achieved step by step: – Promoting diversification and vitalization of career paths enhance excellence in education and research. – The creation of “Team Science” is crucial to inspire cooperation between diverse organizations and disciplines. – Enhance the quality of work increase the scientific knowledge and makes a social contribution. – Make impact through the value of academic leaderships. – Open Science stimulates interaction between science and society. One of the main keys of the Dutch approach is emphasize the importance of the education and stimulate the collaboration. Together with it, it is necessary develop new strategy evaluation protocol. Despite the horrible Corona crisis, we had lived, some useful developments were made: – The Scientific different disciplines are connected – The Scientific community makes a large number of cooperation – The knowledge achieved is clearly explained to general public for the interpretation of developments by academics.
Research assessment. A key point in the transition to Open Science is that the academic career assessment has to ensure the European higher education and research reflecting the changing needed for the development of the novel open approach. Nowadays, academia evaluates very important the research publications rather than open science and open access. However, there are many fields considered important from the research careers, such as attracting external research funding and the research impact. The evaluation of academic activities is assessed by number of publications and citations, as well as qualitative, peer-review assessment. The publication metrics used for research careers is mostly the journal impact factor, the h-index, and the field normalized h-index.
One recommendation to move to open science world is expanding the range of academic activities evaluation metrics. The main perspectives from ERAC SWG HRM are given in the areas of work of: – Monitoring of the implementation of the activities and initiatives in the Open Science action plans. – Strengthen mutual learning activities through information exchange, identification of best practices. – Define and use appropriate indicators for monitoring progress at national and European levels. – Development of common guidelines to reinforce a consistent implementation of actions of common interest and inspire new actions. The open science challenging career evaluation is a priority of the Iberian universities. The development and implementing of a common guideline for the academic and research career assessment must include the contribution to open science. The metrics assessing the contribution to Open Science has a low impact. Encouraging the change to open science will be rice firstly implementing new metrics for the assessment of academic and research proposals. We are in “work in progress” in the transition. Many open electronic journals are created but by now they have low impact in the science community.
The career evaluation in the Portuguese Universities follow a vertical progression and an horizontal progression. The vertical progression consists in an assessment which may occur at any moment by the institution. The international call for candidates with evaluation through a panel of 5-9 specialists. Open science may have a role depending on institutions and panels. From a horizontal point of view, the evaluation occurs periodically and is base in a large set of indicators. The role of Open Science is limited due to the absence of reliable indicators. Promoting Open Science in the context of career evaluation may be done at two different levels: – Institutional level: defining recruitment criteria that can promote a true quality evaluation and are Open Science inclusive. Provide institutional platforms to support Open Science. – Scientific community level: providing the certification of the scientific quality of open access journals, namely on peer review procedures and developing reliable and meaningful quantitative indicators. In parallel to Open Science there is Open Knowledge which has the goal of founding transferring to society. The main objective of ANECA is consolidate the six-year period of transfer with clear open knowledge updated criteria. Share the research topics, encouraging and motivating research in basic science.
Comments. The CRUP/CRUE Open Science Seminar on Career Assessment in the transition to Open Science was truly interesting and stimulating. As PhD student is crucial to understand how the scientific world want to move and I really appreciate the trend to increment the impact to Open Science. This particular period of the Corona crisis teaches us something important: collaborating, sharing knowledge and work together is crucial to grow up and improve our work. Surely, the transition will be a slow path which has to start form the re-organization of the assessment criteria, rewarding the contribution of academia and research in Open Science.
#IamAnOpenScientistBecause… science connects the whole society.