Independent evaluations of researchers are standard procedure in the world’s leading institutes; it usually takes place in four to six-year intervals. Evaluations solely by foreign committees have never taken place in the Czech Republic to such an extent. CEITEC has found inspiration abroad, mainly at the Belgian VIB institute. The evaluation is taking place on the level of all 64 research groups that operate within CEITEC’s 7 research programmes. “Regular and solely professional evaluations are absolutely key for the long-term successful operation of our centre. The intent is not to demonstrate to all around how excellent we are. The intent is to receive an unbiased picture of current conditions and also to receive recommendations from capacities in the field. It will enable us to support targeted the best researchers and particularly to assure them that evaluations at CEITEC will be fair and will take into account solely the quality of research in every case,” states Tomáš Hruda, the Executive Director of CEITEC.
An independent evaluation by external evaluators is a part of the long-term strategy of the centre’s management as well as being beneficial to the centre’s international standing and management. Individual evaluating committees are chaired directly by members of the International Scientific Advisory Board of CEITEC, the top scientific advisory authority, which helps to set the basic direction of scientific focus for the centre. All members of the Board are renowned experts active in world-leading institutes (you can find the members of the Board HERE). This year, the first initiatory evaluation is taking place. Further evaluations will take place in 2014, 2016 and 2020. Subsequent evaluations will take place in four-year intervals.
“We don´t know the exact results yet, but generally the first evaluation has shown that some research groups can already rank among the European elite. And most researchers recruited by CEITEC definitely have the potential to achieve that level. If they also manage to follow other principles set by the institute’s international management, there is no reason for CEITEC not to rank among the leading European centres in a 5 to 10-year timeframe,” says Professor Wolfgang Knoll, the Scientific Director of the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and the Chairman of the CEITEC International Scientific Advisory Board.
The system of evaluation consists of three parts. First, standard results for scientific work, the quality of published outputs, cooperation with the application sphere and success in getting international grants were evaluated. The evaluation is exacting. For example, any publications falling below the median in the relevant field are not included in the evaluation and, in contrast, the most prestigious journals are assigned a higher evaluation weight. In the second part, individual research groups were compared to relevant top teams in their fields in prestigious research institutes in Europe – namely the Imperial College London, VIB (Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie) in Belgium, EMBL (The European Molecular Biology Laboratory) based in Heidelberg in Germany and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. In the third part there were personal interviews by scientists with the evaluators, who, apart from the overall vision and goals of the group, also evaluated the ability of Group Leaders to convince them that in future they can truly attain top results and bring the level of science at CEITEC closer to the best research centres. The ability and clear plans of the Research Group Leaders to ensure support and growth for young talents is also essential. Finally, reports from all parts were summed up, which will provide a quantifiable reply as to how the given team is doing and includes very important recommendations.
Partial results of the evaluation will be discussed by two main managing authorities at CEITEC, the Coordination Board and the International Scientific Advisory Board as soon as today. The chairpersons of all committees will announce the basic evaluation results of their programme here and will to point out prospective problems and risks. The scientists will have their complete results by the end of this week. Today, there are also public lectures by individual experts taking place at the Faculty of Information Technology, BUT in Brno (you can find the schedule HERE).
