Tag Archives: policy

W-log #6: EOSC Symposium, National Scientific Qualification, CoARA

What happened? A few weeks ago, the EOSC Symposium 2024 organisers opened registration for the event. The symposium is the annual venue to present and discuss all the activities behind the European Open Science Cloud (a.k.a. EOSC) that aims to develop a web of FAIR Data and services for science in Europe. On this occasion, the new task forces initiated by the EOSC Association will be formally presented and start working on new guidelines and specifications to help infrastructures, adopters and enthusiasts to be part of the Cloud. If you are curious, the outputs developed by the task forces of the previous calls are available on the EOSC website.

What I did. I was involved in an unusual lecture for the students of the PhD programme in Cultural Heritage in the Digital Ecosystem, which also saw the presence of several postdocs and early-stage researchers. The topic of the lecture was entirely dedicated to the mechanics of the Italian academic system, with a focus on the academic career and the process of the National Scientific Qualification, i.e. the mandatory requirement a scholar must have to become a professor in an Italian university. We have analysed such a scenario from three distinct perspectives, representing the related research and teaching areas of my Department: (a) antiquities, philology, literary studies, and art history; (b) history, philosophy, pedagogy and psychology; (c) mathematics and informatics. There were great discussions in the middle and end of the lecture, followed by some (informal) ethical considerations about the procedures introduced, with a final hope: that the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) can address, in some way, at least part of the problems in the current procedures.

What to read. Since I’ve just mentioned it, in case you did not have the chance to explore more about this topic, I would strongly suggest looking at the work done by CoARA with the development of the principles and commitments for reforming current research assessment practices within research-performing organisations:

Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment. (2022). Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment [Policy]. European Science Foundation. https://coara.eu/agreement/the-agreement-full-text/