Few know the work and personal challenges of being a scientist in Spain. Passing a doctorate, a training process with a high potential to impact your mental health, is just the beginning. Many scientists sacrifice years in different institutions and countries, truncating their relationships and life projects to become key pieces for the progress of knowledge in Spain. Very few will do so covered by extremely selective contracts of 2-3 years duration, such as the prestigious European Marie Curie, the Spanish Juan de la Cierva or their regional versions. The vast majority will survive through periods of unemployment and contracts of a few months. After such a salmon run, reaching an average age of stabilization between 43 and 45 years. The scientific career in Spain offers fewer reproduction options than that of fish.
During times that can exceed a decade, scientists have to dedicate several hours at the end of their work day to devise, justify and request work that will sustain them for a couple more years. These endless overtime hours will only be worth it if a competition is passed and the scientist remains employed. To find out, he will have to wait half to a year and, if he succeeds, half a year more to receive a new salary. The Spanish science administration imposes this type of life through the current system of calls to support scientific work. Our experience inside and outside the country has allowed us to see that this system is also plagued by toxic tendencies for the survival of our scientists. These tendencies are marked by a lack of empathy, efficiency, judgment and will. Below we show why and propose solutions.
Lack of empathy
The calls fall like the rains in Spain, few or torrential, forcing scientists to ask for everything, trampling the development of their research. For example, between January and February 2022 there were five overlapping calls, four for economic financing (Ramón y Cajal, Emergia, Projects of the Junta de Andalucía, State Ecological and Digital Transition Projects), and one for evaluation of scientific quality individual (the I3, now R3). Furthermore, political needs seem to take precedence over the vital needs of scientists. For example, this year the EMERGIA projects of the Junta de Andalucía have not yet been released.
Lack of efficiency
Furthermore, each call requires extensive and different combinations of documents that describe the curricular merits of scientists. These redundant tasks end up invading the workday, and thus, the administration ends up paying to rehash resumes for calls. Instead, you should reward the ability to discover and solve complex problems with steady work. This administrative paraphernalia that annually consumes hundreds of hours of life, work and personal, of the scientific community is unnecessary.
Lack of criteria
These calls gargantuan They often contain extremely arbitrary participation requirements. As an example, the latest “Atrae” program of the State Research Agency for attracting international talent, where candidates with more than 10 years of experience abroad have no place if they have not been “Five of the last seven years in the foreign”. Furthermore, the lack of transparency in the criteria and scales applied in the evaluations only generates distrust. The criteria are extremely subjective. For example, one evaluation criterion is “leadership capacity”, but then, it is impossible to know how many points you will get for each thesis directed or project led. The scales of these criteria will only be published, if there is any luck, after the evaluations. As a consequence, some candidates are valued things that others are not even considered. The obscurity in the application of criteria contrasts with the precision of the numerical qualifications, which in some cases can deny certification by less than half a point. This blocks the right to properly argue a reconsideration. It is difficult not to think that these decisions follow dark interests existing within the evaluation commissions.
Lack of will
It is not acceptable that more than 3,300 specialists temporarily hired in Spain (data from CSIC and universities) cannot establish themselves and reproduce. Reducing the average age of stabilization will not be possible as long as we remain behind Europe in terms of investment in R&D&i, as a percentage of GDP. However, even reaching the idyllic 2% of GDP in R&D&I will be bread for today and hunger for tomorrow. We need to renew the science management system, and we propose the following solutions
A more empathetic system
First, change the turbulent flow of funds associated with calls for a continuous financing model, in which new projects can be requested, electronically, throughout the year. To solve societal problems, scientists should design projects based on the results or capabilities they achieved with their current project, not a year before they had them. With continuous financing, work peaks caused by specific avalanches of applications and the consequent delays in resolutions would be avoided. In addition, the stabilization of the size of the workforce in the managing body would be favored.
Thus, the managing body would cushion the budget pulses of the financing organizations (State, autonomous communities, companies, patrons, etc.). Researchers could thus request projects at any time of the year. This is already done successfully in the famous state foundation for the protection of science of São Paulo in Brazil (FAPESP). In the model we propose, financing organizations could choose which topics to finance in each delegation of the managing body, allowing specificities of financing in each autonomy. For scientists, the important thing is that it allows them to adjust their applications to the duration of their contracts, that the evaluations are agile and that they do not have to participate in multiple simultaneous calls.
More efficient evaluations
Second, the managing body must have a hybrid, telematic and automated scientific evaluation model. In it, researchers would simply update their Normalized CV (CVN) on a public platform and accredit their merits with digitized documents, as is currently done in the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA). Scientific activity would be automatically evaluated for each level of the research career based on the competencies established by the European Union (R1-R4). Once the requirements of one professional stage have been met, financing could be requested for the next. In the evaluation, scientific and administrative reviewers would evaluate the veracity of the CVN, the suitability for the requested project, and the legal/fiscal adequacy of the requested resources. Thus, the review of CVNs and projects can be more detailed. In addition, the enormous work dedicated to requesting and evaluating calls with repeated candidates is eliminated.
More transparent criteria
To ensure the transparency of the evaluations, this body should keep the criteria and quantitative scales public and updated to demonstrate these competencies, allowing each candidate and the evaluators to calculate a similar score.
In this system, since scientists can request evaluation for the next professional stage as soon as they reach the minimum requirements, scientific careers that develop at different speeds have a place. Thus, a few selective processes spaced by a few years of job stability – two to four years depending on the stage – will sift out scientists little by little. Finally, only those who reach the level necessary for stabilization will be able to access it.
Science solves the most complex problems of society, but how are we going to lead our best students down a path that threatens their professional and personal future? We need a drastic change. Science managers must consider this now and ensure the general interest of our scientists.
Agustín Camacho Guerrero He is a researcher at the Universitá degli Studi Roma Tre.
Teresa Boquete Seoane She is a biologist and distinguished researcher from the University of Santiago de Compostela.
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