Research Culture: Creating SPACE to evolve academic assessment

Universities and research institutions have to assess individuals when making decisions about hiring, promotion and tenure, but there are concerns that such assessments are overly reliant on metrics and proxy measures of research quality that overlook important factors such as academic rigor, data sharing and mentoring. These concerns have led to calls for universities and institutions to reform the methods they use to assess research and researchers. Here we present a new tool called SPACE that has been designed to help universities and institutions implement such reforms. The tool focuses on five core capabilities and can be used by universities and institutions at all stages of reform process.

Automated summary

The paragraph discusses the challenges universities and research institutions face when assessing research and researchers, as well as introduces a new tool called SPACE to help implement reforms that focus on important factors such as academic rigor, data sharing, and mentoring.