ShareAQU Catalunya presents the Agency’s current accreditation criteria for associate professors and full professors at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
The session also addressed the adaptation of these criteria to the principles of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).
AQU Catalunya held a session today at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) to present the new criteria for the evaluation of associate professors and full professors, in force since April 1 last year after the Research Evaluation Commission (CAR) gave them the green light. The head of the Assessment of Teaching Staff and Research Department at AQU Catalunya, Esteve Arboix, and the technical advisor to management, Josep Manel Torres, were responsible for presenting these new criteria in detail to the members of the UOC who attended the session, in which the adaptation of the new criteria to the Organic Law of the University System (LOSU) and to the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) was also addressed.
The two representatives of the Agency discussed the evaluation of knowledge transfer, as well as the specificities of the evaluation of the Arts and Humanities. Arboix and Torres also explained the evaluation of research periods, the new narrative CV formats and, finally, also some specific models of journals that publish scientific articles.
The session was organized at the request of the UOC’s Open Science unit and is part of the various actions that AQU Catalunya has carried out to disseminate the new criteria.
The new criteria, aimed at the accreditations of the position of associate professor (research accreditation, according to Law 1/2003) and of the position of full professor (advanced research accreditation, according to Law 1/2003), were approved on January 20, 2025 by the CAR. They are more plural, are contextualized in each field of knowledge and introduce elements of qualitative evaluation of teaching and research merits and, where applicable, of knowledge transfer. These criteria for contracted university faculty, the first in the Spanish state adapted to the LOSU, were subject to a public consultation among interested individuals and groups in the Catalan university system.
AQU Catalunya approved its CoARA Plan at the end of last year and subsequently presented it at an event at the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), and has been a member since 2022. CoARA is an international coalition that promotes the reform of the scientific research evaluation system. In total, it is made up of more than 700 organizations that call for the reform of the methods and processes by which research, researchers and research organizations are evaluated. Its main objective is to go beyond current methods, which depend substantially on publication-based metrics and which sometimes do not sufficiently recognize the wide variety of contributions made by researchers.