Fairly Recognised

This is the 3rd episode of our mini-series on experiences with the recognition and rewards programme at Utrecht University. In the past episodes we have heard from Henk Kummeling, former rector magnificus on the chosen university strategy for the programme: to give space to front-runners and young people with energy.  We have also heard from Verena Seibel, one of those young faculty members that c...

Sanli talks to Verena Seibel, assistant professor at Utrecht university who has been in the lead of conducting a survey among assistant and associate professors for Utrecht Young Academy to evaluate how the new evaluation model of the Unviersity, TRIPLE, is perceived in practice. Their goal has been to provide input for improvements.  The results reveal a mixed and offer a critical perspective. Th...

In this and the coming 2 episode, we will listen to 3 different experiences with the execution and outcomes of the reform programme at Utrecht University.  My first interview is with Henk Kummeling, who was the rector magnificus and a member of the University board when the programme was rolled out. He is currently the chair of the board of CoARA, an international coalition on reforming research a...

Why do we choose an academic career? The answer to this question is different for every person, but if you ask me, we do not discuss it frequently enough, and perhaps not even reflect enough on it for ourselves. In this episode, I re-air a conversation that I had seven years ago with neuroscientist Wim Otte. This conversation had a profound effect on my own perception of an academic career, and se...

One of the main pillars of the Dutch recognition and rewards program is to stimulate open science . But what does open science mean? Back in 2019, when the program started, open science was still an umbrella term covering many concepts from open access publishing to open source data and software, scientometrics, or citizen science. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science was the first internatio...

The Netherlands Recognition and Rewards program is run by a coalition of universities and funding agencies, each of which have chosen to give this programme a different flavor. At Leiden university the recognition and rewards and open science programmes are two parts of the Academia in Motion initiative. According to the initiative website they want to “support the culture change towards Leiden Un...

Meetings, workshops, symposiums, and similar gatherings play a prominent role in every academics work time, and also for all the university employees. These are the times when important decisions are made and debates take place to form a collective understanding. Except for some classrooms, during lectures and tutorials, the meeting culture at the university and academic organisations has not been...

Dr. Alex Rushforth is a scholar in the fields of sociology of science and science policy, with his research and teaching centered on the areas of research evaluation, bibliometrics, science governance and science and technology studies (STS) more broadly. Alex has recently written a critical commentary about the Netherlands recognition and rewards program. He makes the case that: the initiative ha...

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