Academia in Motion: how we’ll build our open knowledge community in 2025
A fresh vision on publishing, a broad set of quality criteria for education and research and plenty of opportunities to share good practices and learn from each other. These are all on the 2025 agenda for Academia in Motion: our university-wide programme that brings together Open Science and Recognition & Rewards.
Hester Bijl: ‘Fostering a more open and transparent work culture’
‘Our university faces significant hurdles, especially with the government’s planned budget cuts. We need each other more than ever as we address these challenges. Academia in Motion will help us in 2025 by fostering a more open and transparent culture, and by offering ways to recognise and reward everyone’s efforts in a more balanced way. Think, for example, of a fresh vision on publishing that shows how we can make knowledge more widely accessible or a broad set of quality criteria for education and research that can be adjusted to different scientific and strategic contexts. This year, Academia in Motion faculty teams will also share good practices and offer opportunities to learn from each other. Now, more than ever, Academia in Motion can help us to strategically work on what we collectively stand for. There’s much to look forward to and I’m proud to see us moving forward together. Let’s make this a year of growth, collaboration and purpose.’
Jessica Kiefte-de Jong: ‘Focus on societal impact’
‘As the LUMC and Leiden University’s interdisciplinary Health Campus in The Hague, our mission is interdisciplinary research and teaching that improves the health of us all. We view societal impact as an essential aspect of quality and have therefore started a pilot with the CWTS to develop indicators that go further than the traditional research quality criteria. We are considering how this aligns with our own research agenda, which was developed in collaboration with societal partners, and are also developing indicators focusing on team composition, developing interventions or innovations that can be applied in practice and ensuring the results are incorporated in policy reports. It’s a challenging yet exciting process and we hope to lay a firm foundation for truly integrating Academia in Motion in our work.’
Erik Weijers: ‘Working on quality criteria for teaching’
‘One of the main ambitions of Academia in Motion is fundamental equality between different fields. Efforts and achievements in education often end up being overshadowed. Our working group is therefore working on an instrument that makes the quality criteria for teaching at different levels much clearer. We are also thinking about the pieces of evidence that can be used to objectively determine teaching achievements. This is with the ultimate goal of increasing career options based on teaching achievements at our university. We hope to test our model at a number of faculties in 2025.’
Coen van Hasselt: ‘Taking the next steps towards open publishing’
‘Over the past year, we have worked with a university working group on an open publishing vision. We obviously gained input from across the university. Not an easy job because there are big differences between disciplines when it comes to publishing. In 2025, we therefore want to encourage the faculties and institutes to look at how this vision can be converted into a concrete and discipline-specific publication policy. I also look forward to the next steps that we will take together to make the underlying research data available for use.’
Also in 2025: more attention for our collective talents and contributions
Not only Academia in Motion is working towards a more open and transparent knowledge community. In 2025, the new format for annual interviews – GROW – will continue to be rolled out across our university. In the Academia in Motion-spirit, GROW recognizes both individual and team-oriented contributions, focusing on collaboration and personal reflection. Furthermore, HR will improve the connection between processes such as GROW interviews, recruitment and selection and learning and development. This will help our university to provide space for talent development in a safe and stimulating learning environment.