In response to an institutional culture that had become overly reliant on quantitative indicators for research assessment, and from a desire to promote a less competitive academic environment with a renewed focus on collaboration, Ghent University developed a new conceptual framework for research evaluation that is guided by eight principles.
As a part of a broader action plan on Open Science, a national consortium called Universities Norway formed a research assessment working group in the fall of 2019 with the objective to build a national career assessment framework.
In a position paper published in November 2019, the Netherlands’ public knowledge institutions and research…
The Open University of Catalonia (UOC) shifted the focus of their assessment criteria and practices for recruitment and career progression away from journal-based outputs to a much broader discussion of achievements. Due to the centralization of career progression for faculty nationally, the new assessment criteria apply to postdoctoral fellows and UOC research staff, not professorial staff.
The University of Bath (United Kingdom) released “Principles of research assessment and management” in 2017. The Principles were designed to “encapsulate current good practice and to act as a guide for future activities” across all disciplines and indices at the university.
Finland is among the first countries to have developed national recommendations on responsible research evaluation. In 2020, a task force formed by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies published the “Good Practice in Researcher Evaluation: Recommendation for Responsible Evaluation of a Researcher in Finland.”
University Medical Center (UMC) Utrecht changed its approach to academic assessment through the development and implementation of a new evaluation framework. The purpose of the framework is to move beyond bibliometrics-based evaluations; it formally requires qualitative indicators and a descriptive portfolio when making hiring and promotion decisions.