Recognition & Rewards

How we reward researchers and their research should do justice to all of their qualities. Until recently, researchers were mainly assessed for their research performance, such as the number of publications, the journals in which they publish and how often their articles are cited. With recognition and rewards, we pay more attention to diverse career paths. Examples are research, education, impact, leadership, but also the contributions that researchers make to open science and patient care. We provide room for a proper balance between individual talent and team science, appropriate to the objective of the research.

ZonMw includes these different aspects in its policy and the assessment of research and researchers.

A new assessment method: evidence-based CV

As a research funding body, we are in part responsible for the quality of the research system. We aim to fund research of high quality and provide room for researchers to develop their talents. We do that by assessing applicants and their proposals in a different way. An example of this is the evidence-based CV that NWO and ZonMw use in the NWO Talent programmes.
Link to instruction: E&W video (developed with NWO).

Collaboration

This evidence-based policy is one of the activities inspired by the position paper 'Room for everyone's talent' that we launched together with the Universities of the Netherlands(UNL), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Every party has its own role to play in this, including our organisation as a research funding body. Wherever possible, we also implement these principles in our policies and procedures in other ways. For example, we promote team science with the programme ZonMw Open Competition  

See also Universities of the Netherlands: Recognition and Rewards for academics.

The position paper 'Room for everyone's talent' is in line with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)..This is a worldwide initiative that was established, amongst other things, to reduce the uncritical use of bibliometric indicators such as the h-index and Journal Impact Factor. We signed DORA in 2019 together with KNAW, UNL, NFU and NWO.

Internationally, a movement has also arisen to reform the way in which research and researchers are rewarded. This has led to The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, which we signed in 2022.