We have interviewed more than 80 researchers at Lund University about how they experience their work situations according to the 40 principles stated in the The European Charter and Code. The interview phase is now over and the project group has already started to compile all the data. There are many ideas to read and a great many proposals for change to be summarised. The project group has bundled together some overlapping principles and we have looked at how many times the researchers mentioned each principle. Some things can already be observed: there were comments on all 40 of the principles and there were certainly many researchers who talked about improved recruitment processes and clearer career opportunities (see previous blog post). However, many also talked about principles that we thought we had put to bed, so to speak. Apparently not. We cannot emphasise enough how important it has been to meet researchers face to face and how grateful we are for researchers’ time and engagement. We are also staying in touch with the other large university-wide projects such as RQ20 and Tellus so that we can link our respective work where relevant.
What is the next step?
Now the work to produce an action plan begins, based on the problems and suggestions for solutions that have emerged from the interviews. We have also asked all of the academic appointments boards at the University to look at the checklist ‘Open Transparent Merit-Based Recruitment’ that we will send to the EU together with the action plan. In addition, it is time for us to summarise the process so far and to plan for the future with the implementation of the action plan and the organisation required for that implementation. We are also already starting to think about how our self-evaluation is to be set up and what we will need to look at then, in just over two years’ time.