Excellence and the new social contract for science: In search for scientific excellence in a changing environment.

T he notion of “scientific excellence” has entered the vocabulary of scientists and funders and has embedded itself in the language of evaluation guidelines as part of a broader discourse about the new “social contract” for science. While excellence in science should be nurtured and rewarded, and while structures and practices that support excellence are important, the questions of what we mean by “scientific excellence” and how we can measure it remain open. The trend, at least in Europe, seems to be to apply “objective” numerical measures—that is, scientometrics— to identify excellence. However, the blind use of scientometrics could compromise scientific development if it is only used to apply an ill-fitting measure to what is an elusive concept. It is interesting to note that this trend towards scientometrics and the quantification of scientific performance has not become de rigeur among some of the major scientific powers, most notably the USA. Our increasing immersion into quantification of scientific performance has also not been embraced by everyone; the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) asserts that “It is imperative that scientific output is measured accurately and wisely” (http://www.ascb.org/dora-old/files/ SFDeclarationFINAL.pdf), and that using journal metrics as shorthand for the scientific quality of individual papers or their authors is not appropriate. The signatories of DORA—scientists, funding agencies, scholarly organizations and journals—also reinforced the strongly held belief that peer review is the only system that can properly evaluate research scientists, projects and institutions. At the core of peer review is the careful analysis of individual scientists and their work to understand the nature and significance of their contribution. It is a process that cannot be reduced to simple numbers or metrics that, without knowing the proper context, fail to provide an accurate picture of reality. In fact, many ground-breaking observations that later gave rise to Noble prizes were not originally reported in topranking journals—as a proxy measure of excellence—such as the ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis system discovered by Aaron Ciechanover [2]. ...................................................... “While excellence in science should be nurtured and rewarded [. . .] the questions of what we mean by “scientific excellence” and how we can measure it remain open” ......................................................