Moving towards fairer academic rewards

The current preoccupation with journal metrics has skewed the system by which researchers are rewarded. It has led to a one-size-fits-all definition of excellent research that is unable to incentivise teamwork, scientific integrity and high-risk blue-skies research. ‘The good news is that everywhere in the world, but especially in Europe, people are thinking about incentives and rewards and making changes,’ says Frank Miedema, dean of the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands and a key advocate for improving academic incentives.

Rumblings against the established reward system began in the early 2000s when it became apparent that universities were not fairly rewarding all their researchers. At the University of York in the UK, ‘women were more likely than men to leave it an unnecessarily long time before applying [for promotion],’ explains Robin Perutz, who was head of the chemistry department at the time. Part of the problem came from a lack of transparency in promotion criteria, so a new system was set up that included workshops to explain to staff the range of achievement that would constitute a good promotion case at the university. ‘Essentially the same system has continued ever since,’ says Perutz. ‘I think it has had a major impact.’ Indeed, York’s chemistry department was the first in the UK to obtain a Gold Athena Swan award in 2007, recognising a commitment to advancing gender equality, and is the only department in the country to have retained the award for this long.