Researcher blogs

The Karolinska Institutet hosted the first of three European Commission Policy Support Facility Mutual Learning Exercise on Research Careers meetings. The theme of these meetings are on “More Attractive & Sustainable Research Careers and Better-Balanced Talent Circulation”. This meeting focused on skills and inter-sectoral, inter-disciplinary and interoperable careers, and representatives from 15 different governments engaged in fruitful discussions about research funding and strategy. After the meeting I got a chance to talk to Dr Conor O’Carroll, a research and higher education funding and policy expert, to get his view on research careers and academia generally.

About Conor O’Carroll

Conor O’Carroll started his career as a physicist, first with his PhD in Ispra, Italy in 1982 and then continued in research in Ireland, Germany then Scotland working in both academia and industry settings. Being mobile is a driving tenet in his career, helping him to understand more broadly the research structure in different European countries.

Conor then moved into research management. He worked for the European Commission as a senior administrator, managing training and research mobility funding. He was then part of the setup of Science Foundation Ireland and established the Research Office in the Irish Universities Association. He went on to start his own consultancy firm SciPol Services in 2015. This allowed him to publish on the concept of the global doctoral education, editing and writing a chapter in the book “Towards a Global Core Value System in Doctoral Education” in 2023.

He currently works as an Independent Consultant on Research and Higher Education policy and funding with SciPol and continues to lend his services to the European Commission.

You can read a more detailed biography here.

Q&A with Conor O’Carroll

What is the main reason that people are leaving the academic system?

“Well, I think the main reason why certainly a PhD or postdoc leave is that they don’t see it as a career track for them. In particular, if you’re at postdoc level, you look into your future and you say, well what have I got? I can do another one or two postdocs and then depending on what system you’re in, you may have to leave because of time limits.

So what do you? If people have other opportunities to look around maybe they better get another job. If you get a job whether it be in the public or in the private sector, you have a lot more stability of employment, that’s what it comes down to.

The other thing is that in some countries, the PhD graduates are older, and they already have families. So they have to look and say, what about my family? I need to support them. How am I going to buy a house? I will not be able to get a mortgage if I’m a postdoc.

Within the European system these considerations are tied into a lot of issues around housing and that is a part of the economic issues which exist in Europe. I’ve noticed this in Ireland, a very open country with lots of international companies. It’s relatively easy to hire international talent, but when they arrive, they struggle to find a house. There are also older PhD students with families who simply can’t live or afford to buy a house while staying in academia.”

What has your perspective from the management side of research given you?

“Not to put too fine a point upon it, is the exploitation of PhD students and postdocs. Not just individually by for example bad supervisors, but I’m talking institutionally. Because you have a drive, certainly across Europe of increasing R&D at national level. And of course, if you increase investment in R&D by governments, that money goes into universities and research institutes. And to do R&D, you need bodies, and the body is the PhD student and the postdoc.

These are seen as, let’s say, an expendable resource. What goes in one end goes out the other. If they get a job, great, if not, it’s not our problem. If you look at discussions on research, they focus on the research outcomes, the knowledge, they never focus on the people. That is the most valuable resource, but it only becomes apparent when people talk about talent retention. The fact is, is the people that are trained, they’re the valuable bit, because they’re the ones that create the knowledge. And you need to have them, and you need to support them.

And that is not apparent to somebody in the lab doing their PhD. And what’s not apparent to them is the value of being able to have some protected time for training and especially for postdocs. Protected time where they can start maybe developing their own ideas instead of following a given research project. If they want to become independent researchers, they’re going to have to think for themselves. The attitude of the research funders is that that’s not our problem. We’re paying them to research, go to the lab and do research and be quiet.

Another aspect is that the supervisor is looking to increase their publication rate so they can improve their possibility of promotion and maintain their academic status. The university wants to increase its standing on the global rankings so it can attract more international students, because that dynamic plays a significant role because of the drop after the economic recession in Europe, the drop in funding for universities.

How do you get money? Attract international students. If you get them, they pay lots of money. You notice this if you walk around Dublin up the road from where I live to University College Dublin. You are will see many international students, mainly Chinese or Indian. These international students are there because they bring lots of money which is how universities can mitigate the continuing depletion of national funding for higher education. And how do we make sure we attract them? We make sure we keep on publishing, so we increase our global rankings.

So, you have all of these dynamics playing out and the people who are in, let’s say, at the bottom end don’t realize what’s going on.”

There’s been some discussion about narrative CVs, CoARA, and research assessment frameworks. Do you see that changing research culture and maintaining the academic workforce?

There is a positive change happening and it’s taking place. When the demand for open science through what was originally called Plan S or Coalition S came about a few years ago, the publishers pushed back a lot. But then suddenly all the research funders got involved and said, we’re not paying for this anymore.

Because the fact of the matter is that the publication system now is highly exploitative. Robert Maxwell spotted the potential for high revenues from the scientific publishing system back in the early 1950s. And as an entrepreneur, he looked and said, hey, here’s are people who will pay vast amounts of money. First, they’ll write the article, they’ll give it to me to play around with a bit and format it for publication. And then I can sell it back to them, but they won’t own it. Moreover, their institution will then pay high subscription fees to access the journal. And you know it’s a crazy business model when you explain it to people but highly profitable. There was a rationale initially because of all the typesetting and things that needed to be done originally with publications and journals. But when everything went online, it was so easy to do all that stuff, it made no sense.

So that got traction because the European Commission says you can only publish open access. And all the national funders in Ireland say you can only publish open access. And we’re not going to give you $10,000 to publish in Nature either. That’s overpriced, so we will set maximum amounts. And if the university or somebody else wants to pay for it great, but we are not doing it. So that worked. I think what we see happening now with the with CoARA  (see fact box at the end) of the changed evaluation procedures is that the funding agencies will change. And they are changing. I know one of the Irish funding agencies now does not allow reviewers to use H-index or any type of citation. Instead of their publications they ask the applicants simply for their five most important, research outputs. It can be a publication, but it can be something else like a patent or impact on patients’ health. They ask the reviewers to look at those five research outputs and assess them. Not just look at numbers, look at what was actually done.

The Commission have already partially changed that in their evaluation criteria for Horizon Europe. They will change it significantly for the next framework program. The national funders are already moving in that direction. And of course, if the funders say, “jump”, the universities will say, “how high”? Because they want the money and if they if they must do something to get the money they will. That begins to change the dynamics of how people are progressed and promoted within universities. Because suddenly if they’re finding that, well, it’s not citations and bibliometrics and publications and so-called high impact journals is what’s now needed, we have to do other things.

How is the PhD process changing?

“Whether you’re doing computational physics or whether you’re doing investigations on education, the methodologies are the very same in terms of literature review. The whole process is the same and that’s what it is really a transferable skill across disciplines.

If you look at the PhD, the PhD was developed at a time when first of all, the entry to university was highly restricted to a very small sector of society. Over the last 25, 30 years, there’s been a big opening of education in terms of undergraduate education, postgraduate, and then into PhD education and training. Even 25, 30 years ago, if you did your PhD, you could be pretty much assured that that puts you straight on the academic track because of the absorptive capacity of the system. There wasn’t a big supply. However, that changed over time.

I think it has changed radically since the late 1970’s. Doctoral schools never existed then – there are graduate schools in the US, but these are quite different things. The idea of organized PhDs where people go to industry, come back again or go to all these things are quite new and they do help without doubt.

But what I think is one of the fundamental problems is the implicit expectation amongst those who embark on a PhD that they can continue in the academic system. It’s always so important to make sure that people realize that that is not the case and that they might not stay on. There are so many excellent researchers who don’t get that prized academic job.

There are exceptions because you do have very well-funded, excellent research institutes like Karolinska Institutet and others around Europe, where you do have a much higher proportion of people who are PhD graduates who will go on into the academic or research sector. That’s always been the case but across the broad university sector across Europe, that is not the case and what happens is that people fall into other careers, in a way.

And I think the data presented this morning was interesting: It takes two years for people to realize what they want to do. It was also pointed out that only about 2.5% of PhDs are unemployed. Everybody gets a well-paid job and job satisfaction, and life satisfaction is high amongst PhD graduates, so that’s a good thing. But at the same time, that transition should be a lot smoother.

Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA)
The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) is a collective of organisations committed to reforming the processes by which research, researchers, and research organisations are evaluated. Current research assessment methods rely heavily on publication-based metrics such as citation counts, and often fail to recognise the wide array of contributions made by researchers.

There are currently 698 organisations that have signed up to CoARAs 10 commitments. These establish a common direction for research assessment reform, while respecting organisations’ autonomy. The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment sets a shared direction for changes in assessment practices for research, researchers and research performing organisations, with the overarching goal to maximise the quality and impact of research.

There is also the CoARA Sweden national chapter. This proposal is a major effort between SUHF, the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions, and national research funders in Sweden to work together to find common grounds on the definitions and criteria how to assess research in the future.