Faculty and staff members at Utrecht University will be evaluated by their commitment to open science.

A Dutch university says it is formally abandoning the impact factor — a standard measure of scientific success — in all hiring and promotion decisions. By early 2022, every department at Utrecht University in the Netherlands will judge its scholars by other standards, including their commitment to teamwork and their efforts to promote open science, says Paul Boselie, a governance researcher and the project leader for the university’s new Recognition and Rewards scheme. “Impact factors don’t really reflect the quality of an individual researcher or academic,” he says. “We have a strong belief that something has to change, and abandoning the impact factor is one of those changes.”

A scientist’s impact factor is a score that takes into account the number of publications and the citation rate of the journals where those papers are published. In this system, articles in highly cited journals such as Science, Nature or Cell count for more than articles in journals whose content is cited less frequently. Boselie says that impact factors — as well as a related measure called the h-index — contribute to a ‘product-ification’ of science that values sheer output over good research. “It has become a very sick model that goes beyond what is really relevant for science and putting science forward,” he says.

The new scheme is part of Utrecht’s Open Science programme, a multi-track effort to make research more transparent and cooperative. Open-science fellows embedded within each department will assess progress towards open-access publishing, public engagement and data sharing.