High-quality research requires appropriate employment and working conditions for researchers. However, many academic systems rely on short-term employment contracts, biased selection procedures and misaligned incentives, which hinder research quality and progress. We discuss ways to redesign academic systems, emphasizing the role of permanent employment.
Across disciplines, research quality benefits from transparency and openness, as well as efforts to replicate and reproduce. In recent years there has been a surge in open scholarship thanks to efforts towards promoting robust research grounded in the principles of good research practice, sparked primarily by individuals and grassroots approaches. Yet this movement is up against an academic structure with a high proportion of short-term contracts, precarious working conditions, misaligned incentives and unpaid labour, all of which pose barriers to high-quality research.
Nonpermanent employment is a systemic problem
Early and mid-career researchers, researchers from underrepresented and marginalized groups, and researchers in the Global South in particular suffer from problematic employment conditions in the academic system. Although legislation and policies vary between countries (Supplementary Information), we see a common problem: a lack of permanent positions with dedicated research funding, leading to an overreliance on project-based funding with short-term research positions. Doctoral students may not receive any salary or bursary, or are paid part-time despite working full-time hours. After obtaining a doctorate, researchers spend years or decades on nonpermanent employment contracts1 and on unstable, project-based funding for research positions, and only a small percentage eventually receive permanent contracts. This problematic situation leads to unconstructive competitiveness for permanent positions. In the Global North, where (despite efforts to decolonialize and democratize research) the bulk of published research is produced, research budgets are high but permanent employment is rare. In the Global South, despite a comparatively higher proportion of researchers being employed on permanent contracts, pressure on researchers arises from understaffing due to limited spending on research, poor remuneration, equipment and infrastructure, and lack of mentorship2.
Taken together, these employment conditions have become a hindrance to research productivity, innovation and progress, and are an undisputable source of discrimination3. Paradoxically, these employment conditions are purportedly designed to incentivize high-quality research.
High turnover harms research quality
One argument that is often made in favour of fixed-term contracts regards the alleged benefits of attracting new staff, assuming that a constant influx of new thinkers avoids stagnation and enables innovation. However, the resulting high turnover in academic institutions fosters cursory research and hinders thorough, long-term projects. Research projects often hit a dead end when researchers drop out because their contracts have expired. Methodological expertise, which often takes years to acquire, is lost when highly skilled researchers leave. New generations of researchers have to spend time building up this expertise anew, again only to depart once they have succeeded.
At the same time, extreme turnover leads to extreme competition for the coveted positions that enable researchers to remain in the career path for which they were trained. Although it is hotly debated whether the ‘right amount’ of pressure can foster creativity and productivity4, extreme competitiveness is out of place in academia because knowledge generation is an inherently cooperative undertaking that also requires stability.
Biased selection procedures endanger academic freedom
Another argument that is often made in defence of fixed-term contracts holds that they create an environment in which only the best researchers will remain. We argue that this perspective is myopic, because the selection processes are flawed.
Current selection procedures fall into the trap of Goodhart’s law5: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. When researchers are required to pursue third-party funding or to publish in highly desirable journals, genuine scientific progress and high research quality are not necessarily incentivized. Instead, the incentive system can promote attention to ‘hot topics’ in mainstream research areas, and disincentivize the thorough, painstaking process of corroborating and documenting research to establish robust knowledge. This structure may reward researcher decisions that game the system: for instance, by focusing on ‘low-hanging fruit’, avoiding high-risk projects or even by (intentionally or unintentionally) using questionable research practices to succeed6 — all of which are ultimately detrimental for genuine scientific progress.
This systematic uncertainty in career prospects further tips the scale against researchers from underrepresented groups7, those who are less able to flexibly respond to emerging career opportunities (for example, through geographical relocation or by working overtime) and potentially even those who prioritize research quality over their personal employability. This system also creates strong dependency relationships: researchers must continuously cater to the ideals of those in positions of influence or risk falling from favour. Critiquing others’ research, speaking up about problematic conditions in research or even developing certain research lines may be disadvantageous for one’s chances of securing permanent employment. As a consequence, academic freedom itself is endangered.
An academic system for cutting-edge research
The assumptions that underlie the widespread use of fixed-term employment contracts are deeply flawed. Rethinking the regulatory structures for academia could offer a viable path towards reform. We outline five areas in which we see a need to change the system to promote research quality, based on the argument that a higher proportion of permanent positions could benefit researchers and research quality, academic freedom and researchers themselves.
More holistic research agendas
Currently, swiftly publishing several small but catchy contributions trumps publishing a carefully planned multistudy investigation, because institutional incentives require boosting one’s publication count to excel in short-sighted performance metrics. Performance metrics should be redesigned to support more-holistic research programmes that aim to understand complex research questions; to test boundary conditions and the generalizability of insights; to use effective methods that are possibly nontraditional in a research area; or to ask research questions that lie off the trodden path of the mainstream.
More openness and transparency in research
In the ‘publish-or-perish’ regime, it does not pay to take the time to replicate one’s work or to make data, code and other materials openly available, Resources are often wasted on duplication costs in subsequent projects, and theoretical progress is hindered. Providing robust results, conducting replications and making materials openly available should be actions through which researchers successfully obtain permanent positions8. Because tasks such as providing FAIR data (that is, data that meet findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability criteria), making materials available for reuse and carrying out replication projects should be carried out continuously, we advocate dedicating permanent positions to open scholarship officers who work on these tasks.
More team research
The widespread use of fixed-term contracts reserves permanent positions only for a select few, following an outdated cult of perceived genius. However, because research has become increasingly intricate and interdisciplinary9, teams of researchers with diverse skill sets are the drivers of research progress. Yet, under current incentives, researchers often cannot justify supplying heavy-duty specialized labour in collaborative projects without publishing as the first author10.
Evaluating performance using indicators that reflect contributions to research projects beyond mere authorship order, such as by considering actual contributor roles (for example, using the ‘Contributor Roles Taxonomy’ (CRediT)11), will be an essential step towards facilitating team research. Further, employment policies should be revised to include a higher proportion of permanent positions to account for and reward multifaceted research contributions. Such changes should be accompanied by novel criteria for assessing and incentivizing researchers that reward incremental contributions (for example, publicly reusable code, theoretical development or the creation of reusable datasets) rather than mere publication counts.
Open scholarship in teaching
Currently, the introduction of robust research practices and open scholarship12 into the curriculum is delayed or even ignored13. By not representing the changing norms of good practice in research, academia fails to adequately educate the researchers of tomorrow.
Reform towards incentivizing the integration of open and reproducible principles in higher education is sorely needed14, and could be achieved by budgeting adequate resources for teacher training as well as providing systematic opportunities for further or continuing training over the course of one’s career. Additionally, resources should be invested in developing discipline-tailored curricula.
More resources for civic duties
Current incentives and employment requirements for researchers fail to address vital tasks that are associated with conducting research, such as contributing to academic administration and management, committee work, fostering the relationship of academia to the public and to policy-makers, responding to emerging societal needs in one’s research agenda, and contributing to research communication15. These tasks are civic duties for researchers, but dedicating time and resources to them can be a hindrance to an academic career.
We advocate realism and specialization in academic job descriptions, which should dedicate time for civic duties in the research context. Time invested in these civic duties should be included in corresponding hiring and promotion criteria.
What will bring change
The priorities imposed by incentive schemes and employment policies for academic staff constitute parameters that can be adjusted to create working conditions in which good research practices, rigour and high-quality research are supported and incentivized. One change with potential benefits for research quality is increasing the proportion of permanent positions. In designing such permanent positions, it may be worthwhile to ask whether the multifaceted tasks that researchers carry out can and should be unified in the job description of professors or whether specialization into differentiated positions dedicated to specific tasks would do them more justice.
Overall, systemic change is needed, which also calls for an increase in research funding earmarked for permanent positions. We see two routes for increasing the proportion of permanent positions. First, a general increase in basic state funding would help to relieve the structural underfunding that many publi
