Remove contradictions between responsible research and excellence

“Societal impact requires explicit and time-consuming efforts on involvement and engagement strategies and trust building, on development of participatory methodologies, and communication in ways that require translation into professional languages that are different from the scientific.” a researcher from our study expresses in the project on scientists’ experiences with conducting societally engaged research in with specific focus on responsibility measures and dimensions that these practices are difficult to account for in current excellent merit systems. How do we secure that the work conditions and incitement of researchers to engage with societal challenges and crises that are so much called for are in sync with the merit systems???

The merit systems are now revisited on both EU and national levels. We urge the working groups to consider how requirements of societal impact are not only added to traditional merit systems, but fundamentally revising them in ways that consider how the processes and work conditions of researchers are conditioning the outputs of their research.??

Excellence in research implies an adherence to principles of scientific curiosity, creativity, high quality standards, integrity, ethical responsibility, societal accountability, ecological sustainability, and cultural inclusiveness. The ways in which scientific excellence is measured, however, are often criticized for not nurturing several of those dimensions. An emphasis is put on the quantitative measures of excellence, e.g., citation measures, h-index and journal impact factors. We invite university management and decision makers to rethink excellence through measures of social responsibility, societal engagement, and responsible research and innovation from a participatory perspective. This includes a broader plurality of perspectives (parts of the world, languages published, diversity of knowledge bearers, etc.). The principle of excellence should furthermore be quality over quantity. Social sciences and humanities are disadvantaged in excellence evaluations, which are also the disciplines with most societal engagement concerns. ?

As part of the Re:ERUA project (read more here)?financed by the EU Horizon 2020 program grant No 101035808), the research team at Roskilde University conducted a mixed-method research study, interviewing 35 university-based researchers and send out quantitative survey to 5 reform universities in Europe (Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece). We mapped social innovation and Societal engagement, while taking into consideration what an ethics of care perspective could add to how we envision universities as a vital societal actor. ?

By encouraging researchers to engage with societal and global challenges, we need that the merit systems are in accordance with this request.???

?Read more about our research at here

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