The GYA, InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) and International Science Council (ISC) have joined forces in an initiative to take stock of developments and debates in research evaluation worldwide, across diverse research cultures and systems, and to re-imagine research evaluation for the 21st century.
The imperative to re-think the ways that researchers and research outputs are evaluated and assessed is increasingly clear and urgent. Research evaluation regimes and practices are having wide-ranging, complex and ambiguous effects, including on the culture of research, the quality of evidence informing policymaking, priorities in research and research funding, individual career trajectories and researchers’ well-being. These issues play out differently across scientific disciplines and regional contexts. Further, open science frameworks and moves towards mission-oriented science are changing traditional ways of doing and communicating research, requiring new thinking on research evaluation and assessment.
Innovative and progressive approaches to responsible research assessment are being developed and piloted by some higher education institutions and research funders in various countries around the world. However, a concerted global initiative is required to mobilize research and research funding communities, and higher education institutions, to develop and adopt ways of evaluating, assessing and funding research that enable research to fulfil its role as a global public good and to address today’s challenges in more efficient, equitable, inclusive and cooperative ways.
An international Scoping Group had been formed in 2021, to explore the pathways to impact for this initiative. The Scoping Group met in June 2021 and March 2022, and conducted a series of regional consultations from October to November 2021. This scoping process then culminated in the publication of a global synthesis paper in May 2023, which will now inform future interventions by the three partner organisations.
Read the synthesis paper here.
Find a summarising info graphic here.
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In May 2024, the three organisations produced a paper on “Snapshots of reform – Researcher Evaluation within Science Organizations“. The paper was authored by CultureBase, and the publication builds on previous joint work in 2023.
In May 2023, the GYA-IAP-ISC synthesis paper on the Future of Research Evaluation was published, to which GYA Scientific Excellence working group co-lead Carlo D’Ippoliti and alumna Shaheen Motala-Timol had contributed as members of the Scoping Group together with IAP and ISC representatives.
A concise info graphic about the report can be found here.
