The BUA-funded innovation group “Matters of Research Assessment and its Implementation” (MAI) led by Dr. Cornelia Schendzielorz (HU, RMZ) and Dr. Miriam Kip (QUEST) started on February 1. The group consists of two separate projects. While the project located at RMZ (MAI-A) focuses on the analysis of research assessments in research alliances and a functional, goal-oriented and sustainable governance of the BUA, the project located at QUEST (MAI-I) deals with an applied optimization of research assessment in the field of appointments of professors and tenure track evaluations at the different BUA partners.
Existing systems of research assessment no longer do justice to current requirements and developments in science and society, such as digitalization, diversification of research tasks and career paths, or the emergence of new formats of research outputs and application models. Different national as well as international initiatives on the part of politics and science stress the necessity to align research assessment with the changing research practices (e.g. Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment - CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment), the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, Open Science Framework, and the recently published recommendations by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on the status of publications in research assessment as well as the DFG position paper on Open Science).
MAI-I aims to work together with the BUA partners to develop strategies for the individual institutions on how current developments, e.g. in the context of the EU framework programme of responsible research and innovation (RRI), should and can be transferred into the practice of research assessment. These are intended to reflect the different objectives of the four houses, and at the same time create synergies and similarities for the shared research environment in the recruitment of professors as well as tenure track evaluations.
The project takes an agile, participatory approach conducting a field and need assessment including a scoping literature review and formal as well as informal interviews. Throughout the entire process, the project commits to stakeholder engagement and capacity building and supports knowledge exchange between the institutions providing information sessions, workshops, presentations, etc.
In addition to Dr. Miriam Kip, who leads the project, Dr. Juliane Klein is part of the project team. Ms. Klein has been working at Charité since 2016, previously as personal assistant to the Dean and then as project manager in the BUA administrative office (Stabsstelle) of the Charité. In the beginning of April, another colleague will complete the team. The innovation group will be funded by the BUA until October 2026.
Link: https://osf.io/yd9sz/
