About the topic
Following the movement towards more openness and transparency in research assessment and research information, the debate around university rankings has received increased traction. A criticism against some of the larger rankings, has been that they are black boxed, and difficult or impossible to reproduce. Another that they are reductionist in that they sum complex university missions and institutional diversity into a single, flawed score. The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA), with signatories world wide, advises against using university rankings in research assessment, stating that research organizations should retain autonomy over their own assessment practices, rather than outsourcing it to external commercial companies. Some universities have even taken the step to withdraw from certain university rankings altogether, including Sorbonne, Zürich and Utrecht.
About the speakers
Dr. Erica Conte is the Director of Funding Strategy and Stewardship at Unity Health Toronto in Canada. She is the co-lead of the CoARA TURN Working Group working to develop tools for institutions to address the fourth CoARA commitment related to global rankings. She is also the Director of Change for the newly established Research Evaluation Global Alliance (https://re-ga.org/) where she leads work related to the More Than Our Rank initiative. Erica will speak to the work happening internationally and describe some newly developed tools and resources that are now openly available to the global research community.
Dr. Jeroen Bosman is librarian and open science policy adviser at Utrecht University. He is steering board member of the national Dutch OpenScienceNL funding programme and has contributed to numerous open science and recognition and rewards initiatives and reports at institutional, national and international level. His current activities include fostering the publish-review-curate publication model, open science resilience and digital autonomy. Jeroen will detail Utrecht's position on university rankings and show a range of steps institutions can take to move away from the current form and usage of these rankings
Grab your ‘matpakke’ and join us for the Open Science Lunch on university rankings!
How to join
The event is open to everybody and you can join online on Zoom.
About Open Science Lunch
Each last Thursday of the month at 12.00 we invite you to join us an open lunch to hear about how to make your research more open. We will discuss research transparency and visibility, open publishing, data sharing, and more! After each short presentation we will have a Q&A session, where you can ask questions or try yourself some of the tools and solutions we will present!