SECURE Deliverable 5.4: Report on Summit and Policy Roundtable Promoting the Research Career Framework

On March 6, 2025, the SECURE consortium held its Closing Summit in Brussels. The Young European Research Universities Network (YERUN) hosted the event in its meeting rooms. 77 participants from the SECURE consortium, the European Commission, the European Research Agency, member state research ministries, the sister project DocTalent4EU, research funding agencies, research performing organizations, as well as universities attended in person. Additionally, 205 participants attended the event online. In total, the SECURE Closing Summit had 282 participants. The goal of the Closing Summit was to present the development of the SECURE Research Career Framework (RCF) and the SECURE Tenure Track-like Models (TTLM). Both build on the new Council Recommendation of December 2023 on a ‘European framework to attract and retain research, innovation and entrepreneurial talents in Europe’ (C/2023/1640) and translate them into a toolset of concrete measures and actions which can be used by research performing and funding organizations (RPOs/RFOs) to further develop their research careers. A set of actions from the SECURE RCF was selected and tested by our pilot organizations (RPOs/RFOs). They reported their lessons learned and challenges during the implementation at the SECURE Closing Summit. Additionally, we invited stakeholders representing RPOs, RFOs and early and midterm career researchers to discuss the further development of the SECURE RCF and TTLM and its future implementation. For documentation purposes, an artist created graphic recordings of the talks and discussions during the event. Additionally, photos and videos were taken to be shared online (e.g., short video summary of the SECURE Closing Summit on LinkedIn). All presentations are shared on the SECURE website (https://secureproject.eu/secure-summit). Acknowledgement: The hybrid event was facilitated via Zoom and recorded. With the help of the AI-tool Whisper by OpenAI (version: 20231117) the recorded audio script was analysed to create a text transcript. This text script was summarized with ChatGPT 4o (version: March 18, 2025) to annotate our own notes of the SECURE Closing Summit.