National manager of Recognition & Rewards programme: “every pyramid stands on a broad foundation that deserves just as much respect.”

Programme manager

As national manager, Sanli is the spider in the web of the programme. “My role is primarily to coordinate our network and clarify what Recognition & Rewards does and does not stand for. I head the R&R core team for Universities of the Netherlands, engage with programme leaders and directors, and do my best to communicate about the R&R programme as effectively as possible: through internal newsletters, reports, events, my R&R podcast (coming soon) and, touring all the knowledge institutions. I also report to the national Recognition & Rewards steering group and contribute to programme evaluations.”

Science as a pyramid

Universities and assessment committees are mainly concerned with how many papers a researcher publishes and their track record on attracting funding: in other words, they focus on reputation. A good reputation is rewarded with appointments and research funding. In Sanli’s view, this pressure to perform undermines the research capacity of our academic landscape. “Some researchers write 10 times as many research proposals as their colleagues. Yet many of these proposals stand little chance of being approved and eat up precious time. It makes far more sense to channel all that likely rejected effort into teaching, projects or directly doing research. Researchers dream of reaching the top of the pyramid - sometimes forgetting that every pyramid stands on a broad foundation.”

That broad foundation encompasses education, robust research, data gathering, technical support and peer-reviews. Attracting a broad social interest in these areas (public engagement) also contributes to scientific development. With this in mind, Sanli believes universities would be well advised to facilitate dynamic careers. “The way we do science has fundamentally changed: complex research areas require specialised tasks and greater interaction between researchers from a range of disciplines. Take AI, for example: it requires an understanding of data collection, algorithms, social implications, ethics and application needs. Scientists should be given the space to develop more broadly. Diversity of this kind boosts team performance and enriches science. Universities and funding bodies already recognise that. Now it’s the turn of the people on the assessment committees.”

Road to Open Science

Although universities recognise the value of engaging with society, Sanli points out that too few contract hours are allocated to this purpose. He made a podcast about open science for the Utrecht Young Academy and the Open Science Community Utrecht: The Road to Open Science. For the podcast, he interviewed fellow academics who often express a big difference between the good intentions of universities on paper and their struggle to implement them in practice. As Sanli explains, “Their contract with the university forces them to pour their energies into producing more publications, attracting more research funding and expanding their academic reputation. Yet those same universities continue to insist on the importance of open science.”

While the broad foundation is underappreciated, creating as many PhD projects as possible is rewarded. “Under the current system, you are only a valuable principal investigator or group leader if you supervise at least six PhDs, simultaneously” Sanli points out. “That’s insane: there are areas of science such as anthropology or mathematics where academics have to do their own research and cannot effectively supervise half a dozen PhD students. As a result, the system cultivates a surplus of PhD students, a significant proportion of whom will never get a research position.”

Science: a creative industry centred on discovery

The strong emphasis on amassing publications, research funding and PhD candidates hinders the choices of ambitious researchers, in Sanli’s view. “It fuels a rationale in which a researcher sacrifices their own research time in order to supervise six PhD students instead of three. Beneficial for individual success, but often counterproductive in relation to fellow academics and the discipline as a whole. In the past, this fixation on performance even led researchers to excesses such as data fabrication, dividing their papers into smaller chunks and exaggerating their results. The current system – which rewards individual choices that undermine the collective interest – is therefore unhealthy.”

There must be another way of doing science: treating it as a creative industry that’s all about discovery. “You can’t force that creativity,” Sanli observes. “But what you can do is create the ideal conditions for it. By enabling researchers to feel they have ample time for deep thinking. That they have job security. I want to ensure that universities facilitate and encourage their academic staff as much as possible with a view to achieving maximum impact. So that every member of staff is happy to be working at a university because they have a clear sense that what they do has an impact. Funding bodies can help make this happen by rewarding the broad spectrum of scientific endeavour.”

Future R&R programme

The Recognition & Rewards programme runs until mid-2026. To examine the programme’s impact, in its final year Sanli and his colleagues are embarking on an R&R tour of all knowledge institutions that are willing to host the tour. “We intend to ask researchers, managers and other members of staff what effect the programme has had from their perspective and what could be improved. By combining this with an R&R podcast and an online staff survey, we aim to give everyone a clear impression of the programme.”

Thanks to R&R, almost every knowledge institution now offers career opportunities in teaching, research and impact. As Sanli sees things, it’s now up to the assessment committees and individual researchers to embrace all these pathways too. “It is time for assessment committees to reward those pathways as broadly as possible. And for researchers to approach their managers more frequently with initiatives that expand the horizon. The programme ends in 2026, but the message remains as relevant as ever.”

R&R at NWO-I NWO-I has been working on Recognition & Rewards since 2019. For example, we are now committed to avoiding the use of quantitative publication data as a measure of research evaluation. This is to prevent unhealthy practices with regard to publications. A narrative CV that calls on researchers to substantiate research proposals in ways that are personally relevant is now considered to be a more appropriate benchmark. Furthermore, we now work in line with the action plan developed by NWO and ZonMw’s Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) – launched on 10 July 2025 – to effect R&R reforms in the organisation. A leadership programme is under way, complete with tools for a new approach to research assessment. There will be a sharper focus on qualitative outputs such as community engagement and making data and software openly available. And NWO-I is exploring the scope for a more transparent policy in relation to promotion and recruitment.

Text: Martijn Maatkamp

Newsletter Inside NWO-I, September 2025
You can find the archive of the newsletter Inside NWO-I on the NWO-I website.