The EU has declared 20 ERA (European Research Area) actions for the period 2022-2024 to contribute to the priority areas defined in the Pact for Research and Innovation. The ERA action 3 is targeted to reform the Assessment System for research, researchers, and institutions. As a result, a Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) was established in 2022, and Hanken joined it with other Finnish universities. But what does this mean in practice?
The EU has taken research ethics and integrity seriously, and there are two direct implications: 1) Responsible research assessment, which concerns both job applications and research funding applications, is intertwined with research ethics and integrity. The applicant and the application are screened but also the methods and questions used for the assessment reveal whether the assessing side has embraced the ideas of new responsible research and integrity. 2) All research funding applications sent to the EU funding bodies are going through ethics screening. This means that the applicant needs to consider all aspects of research ethics in the application when it comes to data, methods or communicating the results. If the applicant fails to clarify these, the application will not be funded even if the idea and implementation would be otherwise excellent.
The renewal of research assessment means in short that the assessments should not emphasise quantitative indicators but give more emphasis on qualitative assessment. This goes for both job and research funding applications. Even the prestigious ERC funding body is now changing its assessment when it became the signatory of CoARA, which means that the forthcoming assessments in 2024 will follow new guidelines.
To summarise what this means for an individual researcher: remember to consider all aspects of responsible research in your research work and applications. Forget impact factors in your publication list and CV and instead be ready to point out what kind of impact you have had in your field and plethora of research related activities (also outside of academia) that you as a researcher have been engaged to.
If you need help with questions related research applications, the ethics and open science sections, do not hesitate to ask help from the research funding team and library!
Sirpa Aalto, Head of research funding
