Spain wants to change how it evaluates scientists —and end the ‘dictatorship of papers’

Spain’s much-maligned system for evaluating scientists, in which the sole criterion for career advancement is the publication of papers, is set to be overhauled under new proposals from the country’s National Evaluation and Accreditation Agency (ANECA). The reforms, announced earlier this month, would for the first time see researchers at Spain’s public universities evaluated on a range of outputs besides papers, and would also encourage the distribution of findings via open-access platforms. Many scientists are welcoming the move, saying it will help academia move on from a system that has been described as establishing a “dictatorship of papers.” Currently, ANECA assesses the “research performance” of academics every 6 years. To win a modest salary increase and be eligible for promotion, researchers must show that they have published a minimum of five papers during that period in high-impact journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR), a database produced by the publishing analytics company Clarivate. Meeting the goal also enables scientists to supervise doctoral students and be listed as principal investigators at their universities, which gives them access to a larger budget. The Spanish government introduced this system in 1994 in an effort to increase the productivity of the country’s researchers. And it succeeded: By 2021, the country ranked 11th globally in scientific output, producing more than 100,000 publications annually, a...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news