University of Vienna
ESOF2024 | 12–15 June 2024 | Katowice, Poland
Toma Susi
Toma Susi
Position and institutional affiliation
Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment
BIO
Born and educated in Finland, Toma Susi received his award-winning doctorate from Aalto University in 2011, moving to Austria two years later, where he is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Vienna. His work focuses on electron microscopy and modeling of low-dimensional materials, having authored over 80 peer-reviewed articles and reviews, and contributing open data and code as well as an open grant application. Toma coordinated open science policy at the Young Academy of Europe, chaired an open science task force at the Initiative for Science in Europe, and was a member of the core drafting group for the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment. He now serves on the Editorial Board of Scientific Data and the Scientific Advisory Board of Open Research Europe, and was elected onto the first Steering Board of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).
Title of the lecture
The importance of rewarding good research practices
Open Science has been recognized as a crucial means to improving the transparency, reproducibility and reusability of research. Current forms of research assessment have however become the defining problem for academia, with a whole host of detrimental effects. For the global research system, this fuels the crises of reproducibility, hinders the much-needed transition to open science, and upholds a costly and outdated publishing system. On an individual level, the pressure to conform to one-sided and metricized forms of assessment contributes to stress, burnout and, most tragically, to disvaluing of the varied talents and contributions that people could bring to research. Although these problems have been long recognized, the systemic nature of the dilemma has stymied reform – until the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). Now, diverse research communities finally have a real opportunity to re-evaluate what they reward, to focus on what is truly important, and to ensure that the incentives for individuals are aligned with what is good for research as a whole. As a key component to these reforms, Open Science is simply better science, and it needs to be recognized as such.
