Impact of Social Sciences – Metrics, recognition, and rewards: it’s time to incentivise the behaviours that are good for research and researchers

"Researchers have repeatedly voiced their dissatisfaction with how the journals they publish in are used as a proxy for the evaluation of their work. However, those who wish to break free of this model fear negative consequences for their future funding and careers. Rebecca Lawrence emphasises the importance of addressing researchers’ recognition and reward structures, arguing it is time to move to a system that uses metrics and indicators that incentivise the types of behaviours that are good for research and researchers. The European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform has published a series of recommendations on how this might be done, and encourages their adoption by all stakeholder communities across the research process."