Quality research needs good working conditions

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.