Researchers seek to collectively generate knowledge and provide insights that can help address pressing challenges facing our societies and the world. However, researchers do not operate in a vacuum. The organization of research and higher education shapes how research is conducted, how researchers collaborate, whose contributions are recognized, and what kinds of knowledge are ultimately produced.

Across Europe and beyond, research communities face a range of challenges. Hyper-competitive environments can undermine collaboration and creativity. Evaluation systems often rely heavily on narrow indicators of performance. Precarious employment conditions place significant pressure on individuals and teams. At the same time, developments such as Open Science, initiatives to reform conventional forms of research assessment, and the adoption of AI in its diverse forms are reshaping the landscape in which research takes place.

These challenges are at the heart of the work of the CWTS Focal Area Culture & Evaluation. Our mission is to improve research cultures, enabling researchers and research communities to conduct ambitious research and address pressing societal challenges in an environment that respects and values them while allowing them to develop their full potential.

Why research culture?

We see research culture as a useful way of bringing together debates that are often discussed in isolation such as academic careers, research assessment, Open Science, and scholarly communication. While often addressed separately, these issues are deeply interconnected as they shape the practical and epistemic conditions under which research is conducted.

Within the Focal Area Culture & Evaluation, our work focuses on three dimensions of research culture that we see as particularly important for generating knowledge that is scientifically robust and societally relevant: career structures and academic working conditions, evaluation and funding systems, and scholarly communication practices. Across all three areas, important tensions exist because researchers are often incentivized to adapt their activities to narrowly defined measures of performance rather than focusing on the substantive quality, integrity and the scientific and societal value of their work.

Our focal area brings together critical research and practical engagement across these themes. We work with universities, funders, policymakers, scholarly communities, and reform initiatives to better understand how research cultures are shaped and how they can be improved.

To provide a shared framework for these activities, we recently finalized a new strategic plan for the focal area. The plan, which is available in full on Zenodo, emerged through an extensive process of discussion and co-creation among focal area members, coordinators of the other two focal areas of CWTS, and the CWTS board. Through workshops, written feedback, and individual conversations, we reflected on the challenges facing contemporary research systems and on the distinctive role that CWTS can play in addressing them.

Strategic priority 1: Career structures and academic working conditions

Our first strategic priority focuses on academic careers and working conditions, paying attention to everyday experiences of researchers as they navigate career trajectories, evaluation processes, and workplace expectations. This also includes the organization of PhD training and the postdoc system.

We want to strengthen understanding of how academic working conditions influence well-being, collaboration, epistemic diversity, and research practices, while contributing to ongoing institutional and policy reforms that enable researchers and research communities to flourish.

Strategic priority 2: Evaluation and funding systems

Our second strategic priority focuses on research evaluation and funding systems. These systems play a central role in shaping academic practice, influencing what research is pursued, how success is defined, and which forms of knowledge and expertise are valued.

We will critically examine the effects of evaluation and funding systems on researchers, institutions, and research cultures, paying particular attention to issues of diversity, and implications for scientific and scholarly innovation. At the same time, we will contribute to the development and evaluation of reform initiatives designed to create more responsible approaches to research assessment through our collaborations with initiatives such as CoARA, DORA, RoRI, and the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. As AI increasingly enters research evaluation and funding processes, we also seek to contribute to discussions about what constitutes responsible and legitimate AI use in these contexts.

Strategic priority 3: Scholarly communication practices

Our third strategic priority concerns scholarly communication. Publishing systems not only disseminate research; they also shape academic norms, influence how researchers set priorities and frame their contributions, and structure the distribution of resources and recognition across the research system.

Aside from studying how publishing infrastructures mediate evaluation pressures and shape research cultures, we actively support the development of community-governed and more sustainable alternatives to currently dominant commercial publishing models. This includes Open Science initiatives around Diamond Open Access publishing, the publish-review-curate model, and library-led publishing models.

A particular focus of our work is on strengthening connections between debates on publishing reform and broader discussions about research assessment and research culture. We believe that meaningful change requires these conversations to be linked rather than treated as separate policy domains. We also engage with emerging questions surrounding AI in scholarly communication, including its implications for integrity, new forms of infrastructural dependence, and the broader politics of AI.

Looking ahead

Research culture has become an important concern for universities, funders, policymakers, and scholarly communities across the world. We see this as a very desirable development, since many of the challenges facing research systems cannot be addressed by individual organizations acting alone. They require collaboration across institutions, sectors, disciplines, and national contexts.

The Focal Area Culture & Evaluation aims to contribute to these collective efforts by combining critical inquiry with practical engagement. We see ourselves as a hub for collaboration on research culture issues, with a particular focus on developments in the Netherlands and Europe. Through our research, partnerships, and engagement activities, we seek to contribute to research cultures that enable ambitious and socially relevant research while supporting the people and communities that make such research possible.

We look forward to continuing these conversations and collaborations with partners across the research ecosystem.

Photo by Claudiu Constantin on Unsplash