Working Group: Early-and-Mid-Career Researchers (EMCRs) – Assessment and Research Culture

The focus of the CoARA EMCR WG in the spring of 2025 will be to finalise two reports on academic positions and one on habilitation processes across Europe.

Through the spring we will have 4 meetings in the WG. The three first will focus on 8 countries each – the last gives a status. The meetings are to be working meetings meaning that we will work on finalising country specific entries during those meetings. If you have an interest in the topic please do come along.

Schedule for meetings

Thursday the 27th of March (09.00 -10.30 CET)

Countries: Croatia, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland.

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89539635753?pwd=osySV9QvkFBifvabxKppb1Xe3lVkOg.1

Thursday the 24th of April (09.00 -10.30 CET)

Countries: Austria, Germany, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Romania, Spain

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82259

Thursday the 15th of May (10.00 -11.30 CET)

Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Ireland, Lithuania, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Ukraine, United Kingdom,

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81087792254?pwd=YCSdONaY10IZzyxHRVXrjh0aHi0nOt.1

Thursday the 5th of June (09.00 -10.30 CET)

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86357544776?pwd=lJH3b0HdVSTnMVWJa5WbLxkPCB0W1v.1

EMCRs working in different types of environments, including universities, research institutes or the private sector, are subject to precarity and hypercompetition, and are most strongly affected by research culture and by assessment practices. These assessments happen at a variety of occasions and for different purposes, including hiring and promotion, yearly cadre reviews and success evaluations, project applications, habilitation, defending a disposition or a doctorate, etc. Moreover, EMCRs particularly in earlier career stages face an uncertainty about the academic system, as there is little coaching and training on the existing requirements, an ongoing change that is hard to know what to expect and what will be expected, misaligned requirements by funders, universities etc. – and in some cases EMCRs encounter even hard contradictions between expectations from the outside world (e.g. regarding diverse outputs, new career pathways, open science practices) and what their culture realistically looks like (e.g. through departmental reward structures, lacking infrastructure and budget, or demands by the superior).1 These pre-existing challenges may further become exacerbated through a change of the assessment practices, which needs to be voided and correspondingly represented by a shift in the basic academic research culture.

Objective 1: Gather information and exchange experiences, collect good and best practices – and bad practices to avoid – from a range of different countries and organisations with different levels of implementation of the reform of research assessment and diverse types of institutions as well as different institutional autonomy levels about the impacts of different assessment procedures/methods on EMCRs career paths and the cultures of research systems they are active in.

Objective 2: Develop pilot actions to:

(i) monitor the outcomes and impacts,
(ii) support EMCRs during the change through training and consultation,
(iii) instruct assessors of careers towards novel research assessment practices, and
(iv) implement an inclusive and positive culture (change)

Objective 3: Based on the gathered insights, develop guidelines, models and a toolbox for implementation, which will include monitoring templates, training recommendations, guidelines for EMCR assessment, and methodologies to drive an inclusive research culture change.