The Challenges of Research Assessment: What Research Infrastructures Have Got to Do With It?

In recent years, funders, institutions, and scholarly communities have intensified efforts to rethink ways of measuring research quality. Traditional metrics such as citation counts or journal impact factors have often fallen short in capturing the diverse, collaborative, and evolving nature of scholarship, while the long-standing focus on published final results has tended to overlook crucial scholarly activities such as data curation, software development, methodological innovation, and training. In this keynote, I will explore the role that research infrastructures can play in reshaping research assessment practices by helping us shift the focus from rigid, product-oriented models to more holistic approaches that recognize knowledge creation as a dynamic, multi-step process.