The university-wide “Academia in Motion” (AiM) programme has been ongoing at Leiden University since 2022. It aims to modernise the way we do science and are evaluated on all of our work as university staff. Inspired by the upcoming Academia in Motion symposium on May 12, and the interviews conducted with various colleagues about what AiM means to them, YAL sat down with programme coordinators Karlijn Hermans and Cas Henckens to learn why AiM is important, and particularly relevant to early-career academics specifically.

Karlijn and Cas have been part of the university’s Academia in Motion steering group from the beginning, originally as managers for the themes of Open Science and Recognition & Rewards, respectively. Now that these themes have become more intertwined, Karlijn focusses on integrating AiM in existing policies and inform new policies, while Cas works with the different faculties to help them work together to implement AiM.

Cas and Karlijn, what would you say Academia in Motion is about?

Cas: “It’s about trying to build a university that’s more focussed on seeing all the work that’s being done by its employees, which includes education, research and all other tasks like reaching out to society, science communication, and more. It’s about integrating all of that work into how we value what we do, basing that value on quality rather than quantity.”

Karlijn: “Right, it aims to improve our academic culture that way. It’s quite easy to maintain the status quo, we need dedicated action in order to bring about change – Academia in Motion is exactly that.”

Academia in Motion combines several themes. Why are these relevant to early career researchers specifically?

Karlijn: “I first encountered the concept of Open Science firsthand as PhD student at KU Leuven, working on a very big project. We weren’t educated in Open Science as students, but its principles become a lot more important when you get out of your own bubble and become part of a national or international collaboration. For example, how do you gather and share your data? There are technical and ethical considerations there – if you let young researchers invest a lot of time in gathering data, can you make it available to everyone while still being fair to the person who did the work? Open Science has principles and good practices related to this that are relevant to everyone involved in research.”

Cas: “I was working at the national Young Academy (DJA), and saw lots of young researchers coming in with enthusiasm to bring about change in how we do science, and then burning out having to do all the different tasks expected of them at the same time – research, teaching, leadership, etc – which was such a shame. Recognition & Rewards envisions a much better system that allows people to do what they’re good at, rather than having to do everything at once.”

Why does Academia in Motion combine Open Science/Education with Recognition & Rewards? Are they both important topics that we just happen to tackle at the same time, or is there a connection?

Karlijn: “There is: being able to contribute to an open knowledge community requires at the same time getting recognised for that. Not only for writing publication packages for example, but also the time investment in relation management with people internal and external to academia, and organising meetings or events.”

Cas: “I like the saying ‘Open Science is just science done right’, and doing science right has to include recognising and rewarding doing so, or it doesn’t work – so it’s logical to combine them. Both movements were also at a turning point when AiM started, where people increasingly saw the value of an open science community but were hesitant to work towards it because it wasn’t actually valued in their career path.”

Karlijn: “While I agree it’s logical to combine them, Leiden University is currently the only university to do so; most universities do one or the other, some claiming for example that their focus on R&R doesn’t leave time for Open Science as an additional theme. I thus see it as a strength of our university that we combine them, and get in experts on both themes, and see both themes reinforce each other.”

Cas, you mentioned a turning point in AiM; on what scale, and could you elaborate?

Cas: “Mostly on a national scale, as shown by the position paper on R&R in 2019 ('Room for everyone’s talent'). Around that time, we saw lots of people leaving academia, in part because the societal pressure put on academia was too much. The system needed revision, and every university had work to do there. At Leiden University, the vision document on R&R by Sarah de Rijcke and Manon van der Heijden (2020, 2022) detailed what was at stake, why change was needed in order for us to keep doing what was expected from a university, and already heavily mentioned Open Science in relation to that. In addition, the pandemic, budget cuts from the government, the rise of populism and the associated criticism of science all posed challenges that required a change in the university system.”

Karlijn, you were previously a postdoc at FSW. Have you experienced a need for AiM yourself in that role?

Karlijn: “Definitely. I was hired on a 2-year postdoc position on a very big project with a rather progressive professor, who saw the importance for scientists to do work relevant to society. In line with that, she envisioned non-traditional outputs for my position, like policy advice, educational material, or a citizen science study. She was very transparent even during the application process that this would unfortunately limit my chances of later making assistant professor, since such outputs are still not valued. And indeed, some of the things I created are still not published years later because the system is so traditional. In the end, I chose to fully transition to policy in my current role, rather than continuing an academic career.”

A need for R&R has long been acknowledged, especially by early career academics, but there is skepticism due to how long it’s been taking between talks of R&R and academics actually experiencing its implementation. Can you shed some light on that?

Karlijn: “It’s true, and I think that career policies in faculties are the best example of that: people kept asking for broader and more transparent policies, and for anchoring conversations about career advancement to them. But it’s been taking a long time to get from the first concrete plans in 2022 to get faculties to put this in writing as policy, and then again to implement it – there’s necessarily a lot of people and therefore time involved. That said, we do already stimulate that the principles of AiM are part of new career policies, and in the case of the LUMC also dissertation guidelines. And we stimulate the conversations with supervisors through GROW, giving people some munition for those conversations as well.”

Cas: “Some of the skepticism also stems from misunderstanding, maybe. I sometimes felt that ‘Recognition & Rewards’ was an unlucky name for the programme; especially in the beginning some people contacted us expecting R&R on an individual level, where the programme would be spotlighting their work, which was definitely not the scope of AiM. There’s probably lots of work at the university that isn’t being seen or valued, but for this to fit into R&R, the work does need to align with what the university is trying to do or achieve – and to be clear, there’s lots of that too.

In the end, valuing the work is something that needs to be done directly by your supervisor, so AiM needs to scale down to the individual in that way too, without us trying to enforce a detailed valuation from a central level. Supervisors look to us for clear guidelines on how to work and evaluate their staff, but detailed standards for how to talk about quality, how to write strategies, and more, are all very dependent on the environment they’re applied in. It’s of course frustrating for staff to have to wait for new frameworks so they can place themselves and the work that they’re doing in it, but R&R only works if we get many departments, teams and supervisors involved in shaping these frameworks, and that unfortunately takes a lot of time.

But in addition, I think a lot of the frustration is due to people not knowing what was already possible before AiM. Several barriers that were seen in promotion regulations weren’t actually there in the policies as written; for example, needing four publications for PhD thesis was never in promotion regulations, but most people thought it was – it was a cultural thing. Creating more transparent guidelines and regulation helps with avoiding such situations, because it’s clear to everyone what’s actually required for advancement. It’s difficult in a university as broad as Leiden University, though, because the needs are very different in e.g. Science or Humanities. Creating one detailed programme that fits all didn’t work – instead we need to help individual faculties fill in the details, but based on the same principles.”

Speaking of, Academia in Motion is a university-wide programme, but historically it’s been challenging to get all faculties on the same page, as each faculty does things in its own way. How does AiM approach this?

Karlijn: “Lots of trial and error! In my experience it comes down to a lot of relation management, getting people with key roles involved. That doesn’t necessarily mean board members, it can also be a staff member with a large network or drive to make this happen. And whether you approach goals bottom-up or top-down depends on what you need to do; for example, it made sense for Central to ask deans to create new career policies with the principles of AiM as boundary conditions because it wasn’t going to happen organically, but then from there it can be a bottom-up process within faculties to create such a policy within that scope. A similar thing applies to Open Science guidelines and publication policies.

I often describe my role as a lobbyist: talking with a lot of different people to trying to get things done and bring people together.”

Cas: “Right. In the beginning I was very naive about to what extent these topics like publication culture, social safety, leadership, career policies and so on were already part of everyone’s common knowledge. And when I tried to get faculty working groups together to tackle these topics, including both scientific and support staff, it turned out to be a big bureaucratical nightmare, because scientific staff couldn’t get the time for it – you can see the chicken-and-egg problem – so the teams consisted only of support staff. But then the outcome of such a working group didn’t apply to the scientific staff, causing us to have to go back and forth between different people a lot.

An example of this was a working group which consisted of only support staff, as all scientific staff members were unavailable. The group worked very hard to create a nice toolkit, but even now there’s still lots of confusion on how to apply it because in the end it couldn’t be designed together with the supervisors. It meets the goals of AiM, for sure, but there’s still a barrier to actually using it.”

That relates a lot to what AiM tries to solve – do you think that once AiM is fully implemented, it will be easier to get all staff involved in such workgroups?

Karlijn: “Yes, I definitely think so. To Cas’ example, if we could have gotten more scientific staff involved in workgroups too by having them be recognised for their time investment, it would’ve paid off. Both in accelerating the process and the end result working better, because the people actually using it had been able to contribute their expertise and experience too.

It’s important that we’re able to make conscious decisions on where to invest our time in. For example, participation bodies like the faculty council or an education committee are something people get time for, and it could be the same for working groups such as this. Saying ‘it’s just part of your work’ doesn’t acknowledge that.”

Cas: “Karlijn’s example of having to choose between fully scientific and fully policy career track herself is interesting. I would love if in the future you could do some of both, combining expertises. People leaving academia take knowledge with them about how things work, it would be much more ideal to be able to offer them a hybrid profile and keep them on board.”

Karlijn: “I agree. There’s a lot of ‘us vs them’ thinking at the university, between university policy makers and the scientific community, and I feel they should be less separated. YAL is a nice example of combining both, hopefully we can have more of that.”

When is Academia in Motion deemed complete, and what comes after?

Cas: “When you don’t have to call it Academia in Motion anymore, because it’s just the new normal. When it’s not seen as something “extra”, but just a different way of working – which it is.

As to what comes after, I realise that moving further away from using quantity-based measures to assess work quality all throughout the system takes more time and people than the old system. So the challenge will be how to make sure quality-based assessment will stay manageable.”

Karlijn: “I agree. We will continue to have to keep in mind why we moved to a new system, so we don’t fall back on quantity-based assessments, just because looking at a few numbers is easier.”

Finally, why should early career academics come to the AiM symposium on May 12?

Cas: “Because it will not only be about what’s done so far but especially also about what needs to be done in the next 1.5 years of AiM, and beyond AiM – how we make it the permanent, regular way of doing things. And we want to give everybody a voice in this; attending the symposium is your chance to let deans and boards know what you think is still missing at the university. You as early-career academics will have to work in this system longest, your voice should be counted the strongest.”

Karlijn: “That, and to learn how you can be part of this movement yourself. I’m very curious to hear how early-career academics see their role in reshaping academic culture themselves.”

We thank Cas and Karlijn for sitting down with us for this interview. We encourage all early-career academics to register for the Academia in Motion symposium on May 12 and have their voices heard.