HI-FRAME: Measure what really matters – a framework for Open Science professorial hiring

HI-FRAME is about aligning professorial hiring at UZH with the Open Science movement, while simultaneously also articulating the nexus between Open Science and equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI).

Professorial hirings are some of the most important decisions made at the University of Zurich (UZH). There have been concerted efforts in recent years to ascertain that the hiring processes are conducive to robust hiring decisions, including the introduction of the “Guidelines on Selection Procedures in Professorial Appointments” and the roll-out of a project to address candidates’ leadership and social skills in depth. In addition, UZH is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (2014) as well as of the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (2022), which sets a shared direction for changes in assessment practices.

UZH Selection Procedures

Project to address candidates’ leadership and social skills

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (CoARA)

Goals

In the same vein, HI-FRAME provides UZH’s faculties with an adaptable tool that enables them to take Open Science activities systematically into account in professorial hiring processes, while at the same time fulfilling UZH’s commitment to using metrics responsibly and to taking a broad view of academic profiles.  

Challenges

Firstly, the project lifetime (24 months) was too short to be able to pilot the HI-FRAME tool sufficiently. Secondly, since HI-FRAME was one of the very first Swiss projects to address the “rewards and incentives” component of the Open Science movement, the national-level conversation on how to evaluate research and researchers was only just beginning. This meant that the project was confronted with an “early-adapter” situation, which required awareness-raising, much communication and translation of HI-FRAME’s contents. 

The HI-FRAME framework (catalogue of questions) remains available online.

• Berufungsverfahren und Open Science: Fragenkatalog (DE)
• Professorial hiring and Open Science: a catalogue of questions (EN)

Through HI-FRAME a collaboration with the Swiss National Science Foundation and the University of Geneva could be launched, which generated two Swiss-wide events for practitioners in the areas of Open Science, EDI, and research management from across Swiss higher education institutions. One of the events was also registered as part of the global DORA@10 celebrations.

Moreover, HI-FRAME is part of the DORA online repository “Reimagining Academic Career Assessment: Stories of innovation and change”.   

The HI-FRAME project contributed to the implementation of the UZH Open Science Policy (focal point “Culture Change”). Going forward, the experience with HI-FRAME will feed into the implementation of the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, which UZH signed in 2022.