Open and Responsible Researcher Reward and Recognition (OR4)

Training | Evaluation | Sharing & Integrating | Management & Sustainability | Open & Responsible Reward & Recognition

Lead

Tim Newton, King’s College London
Banaz Jalil, Project Manager, University College London

Background and Scope

The Programme aim is to accelerate the uptake of high quality open research practices. The Center for Open Science theory of change highlights five types of action that can promote change. This project is focused on making open research rewarded and, in particular, making it rewarded via the recruitment, promotion,  and other recognition activities at institutions that employ researchers.

Aim

This project will reform the ways in which institutions recruit, promote and appraise their staff, to better reward open research practices.

Outputs:

Goals

Intervention Outputs and Outcomes

1. By September 24, resources published to support institutions reforming research assessment recognising open research, leading to case studies and others taking informed, consistent and measurable steps by August 2027.
2. By Mar 24, report published on current recognition practice and its effects on open research, leading to more targeted resources and better supported institutions / case studies by Mar 25 and input into UKRN and institutional reporting by August 27.

Evaluation Objective and Output

3. By Aug 26, report published providing evidence on the extent to which the project aim was met.

Activities

Schedule and Relations between Activities

Dependencies with other Projects in the Programme

The ‘Management and sustainability’ project provides leadership, adequate resources, communications and other relevant support to the project.

The Programme website (an output from the ‘Sharing and integrating’ project) should host the project outputs in a way that enables institutions to share and learn from related practice.

The ‘Evaluation design’ project should provide insight into researchers’ experiences of recognition and reward for open research practices at their institution.

Ideally, the ‘Training’ project would produce instructor training to build institutional capacity to meet the project aim.

The ‘Reward and recognition”, “Training” and “Integration and sharing” projects are all supporting communities of practice, and coordination will be needed.

Communications and Engagement

Events will be organised to enable staff at case study and other institutions to develop into a community of practice

Current Position

In April 2024, we published a report with the results of our institutional survey, completed by 59 UK HEIs and one research institute. The report summarised the current landscape of reward and recognition for Open Research and reported on the institutional requirements for support from the OR4 project. Some of the highlights from the report include:

• The majority (~75%) of institutions were found to be undertaking strategic activity to address research assessment reform
• Current policies and statements on Responsible Research Assessment (RRA) are primarily focused on the responsible use of metrics
• Most institutions have yet to adopt a broader definition of RRA which includes recognition of OR practices
• However, 35% of institutions were in the process of integrating OR criteria into assessment frameworks
• RRA reforms so far have had a limited impact on the recognition and incentivisation of OR practices
• There is still considerable lack of awareness, understanding and prioritisation of RRA and OR among many key institutional research stakeholders

The report also put forward recommendations for both institutions and the OR4 project resulting from the survey findings.  The full report can be accessed here.

Our community of practice has grown steadily, and currently there are 54 members working with us comprising a diverse range of UK academic research institutions.. The community of practice is still open to any UK institutions who would like to join. The community of practice institutions are listed below.

Between February and October 2024 community of practice institutions piloted and provided feedback on our resources, including the maturity framework, the self-assessment tool and the guide. And the OR4 project has been supporting institutions to undertake a self-assessment exercise by providing pre-self assessment briefing and post-self assessment de-briefing sessions.

This first phase of piloting the resources ended in summer 2024 and the first version of the Toolkit was published on 15 October 2024. During this initial phase, the OR4 team worked closely with community of practice institutions. We would like to publicly acknowledge the contributions of the following institutions in helping us gather critical insights and perspectives towards developing effective open and responsible researcher assessment practices:

On 19 November 2024 the OR4 project held its first online event to promote the project outputs and activities, including our resources.

The OR4 project is currently supporting community of practice institutions to publish case studies to complement the OR4 toolkit implementation guide. The case studies are designed to illustrate different aspects of implementing change to enable recognition and reward for open research and promote sharing of good practice across the community.

Community of Practice Members

Contact Details:

Dr Banaz Jalil, University College London, b.jalil@ucl.ac.uk