The Swedish Research Council proposes a model for the allocation of a portion of the basic allocation to universities and colleges, FOCUS, which rewards and helps to improve the quality of Swedish research, and work to ensure that research contributes to the development of society. Sven Stafström, Director General of The Swedish Research Council, provides a commentary on the proposal, which is expected to be circulated for comments in 2015.
“The Research Council has now submitted its proposal to the government on the model of allocating a portion of the basic grant to universities and colleges, a government mandate we received in March 2013.
The introduction of FOCUS (Forskningskvalitetsutvärdering i Sverige – Research Quality Evaluation in Sweden), aims not only to enhance the quality of Swedish research and to promote that research contributes to the development of society, but also to promote long-term planning at universities, to function as a support to management in universities and colleges in strategic matters and create greater incentives for universities to prioritize its activities where there is potential for improvement.
By focusing both large and small, wide as more profiled universities receive the opportunity to showcase their strengths in a better way than in today’s model, which does not account for the higher education institutions different conditions.
Our proposed model can also provide a better basis for national and subject-related overview and comparisons which will facilitate both the decision at the institution level as research policies and priorities. In addition, the model includes all research areas, unlike today’s model.
We suggest that the quality of research at Swedish universities will be evaluated every six years – initially more frequently – in a way that can also be the basis for the award of a certain proportion of university research grants.
The assessments shall allow for comparisons between institutions in the research and science fields using three components: scientific/artistic quality, quality developmental factors and impact beyond academia. Our proposal is that the first component must be weighted at 70 percent in the assessment and the other 15 percent each.
The scientific/artistic quality – which includes the criteria of innovation and originality, significance for the research and scientific accuracy and rigor – will essentially be judged by international experts. The criteria of quality developmental factors is potential for regeneration and sustainability where some of the parameters included are postgraduate, mobility, collaboration and equality.
FOKUS also includes an assessment of the research community impact, or impact outside the academy, which is evaluated along criteria, scope and importance. Through case studies of research results in terms of social, economic, environmental or cultural impacts identified – something which we think is important to evaluate but difficult to demonstrate or assess using simple indicators.
Our goal has been that the model should be as resource-efficient as possible, to minimize both workload for individual researchers as costs. Data collection to FOKUS is thus based as much as possible on existing sources.
I want to thank you for all the comments and interesting discussions we have had during the work with the model! We have tried to take into account the concerns regarding potential adverse effects. Several of them – such as management of interdisciplinarity, to avoid system discourages innovation and risk taking, that research is not rewarded at the expense of graduate and undergraduate education – are not linked to right evaluation of the quality with peer review, rather the opposite. We believe that an evaluation system based on peer review has greater potential to prevent or counteract adverse effects than today’s purely indicator-driven resource allocation systems.
What happens now? We expect that the proposal will be circulated for comments in 2015. We have also proposed the government that some parts of our model should be tested during 2016 for a possible implementation.”
Sven Stafström, Director General of The Swedish Research Council