The Recognition & Rewards programme (Erkennen & Waarderen) is a national movement in Dutch academia to change how universities, university medical centres, and research funders evaluate and reward academic staff. Launched in November 2019 with the position paper “Room for Everyone’s Talent”, it is one of the most institutionally coordinated national research-assessment reform efforts anywhere, and a useful reference point for any institution or funder considering how to move beyond journal-level metrics in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions.
This guide covers what the programme actually is, who runs it, what concretely changes under it, how it relates to DORA and CoARA, and what a research administrator outside the Netherlands can usefully take from it. For a documented example of one participating university applying these principles to real promotion criteria, see our guide on how institutions are actually rewriting P&T criteria, which covers Utrecht University’s implementation in detail — this page focuses on the national programme those institutional changes sit inside.
What the Recognition & Rewards Programme Is
Recognition & Rewards is a joint initiative of five national Dutch organizations, coordinated through the programme office at recognitionrewards.nl:
- Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) — the association of Dutch research universities, formerly known as VSNU, which published the original position paper under that name in 2019
- NFU — the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres
- KNAW — the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
- NWO — the Dutch Research Council, the country’s main public research funder
- ZonMw — the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development
Unlike DORA or CoARA, which institutions and funders join by signing a declaration or agreement, Recognition & Rewards is not a signatory framework. It is a coordinated national programme that the five partner organizations run jointly, with each Dutch university and university medical centre implementing the shared principles through its own local policy, career framework, and evaluation criteria. That distinction matters operationally: there is no public signatory list to check, and the pace and specifics of implementation vary by institution.
Origins: “Room for Everyone’s Talent”
The programme’s founding document, published in November 2019, argued that the Dutch academic system had become too narrowly focused on research output — publication counts and journal-level metrics in particular — at the expense of teaching, societal impact, leadership, team contributions, and (for university medical centres) patient care. The position paper called for a more balanced, multidimensional approach to evaluating academic careers, one that recognizes different forms of excellence rather than ranking all academics on a single metrics-driven scale.
This diagnosis overlaps closely with what DORA and CoARA argue at the international level, and the Dutch programme is frequently cited internationally — including in DORA’s own case-study library — as one of the more advanced national implementations of assessment reform, precisely because it operates through national funders and university associations rather than through individual institutional pledges alone.
The Five Recognition Dimensions
Recognition & Rewards asks institutions to structure career evaluation around five areas of academic contribution, rather than research output alone:
- Education — teaching quality and educational leadership, not just research supervision
- Research — including the quality and reproducibility of research practice, not only publication volume
- Impact — societal and knowledge-utilization impact beyond citation counts
- Leadership — academic leadership, including team leadership and mentorship
- Patient care — for university medical centre staff specifically, clinical contribution alongside research
The intent is that an academic’s career profile can be strong in a combination of these dimensions rather than needing to excel at all of them equally — a “diversify, don’t clone” framing similar to CoARA’s own language about avoiding a single normative model of what a good researcher looks like.
What Changes in Practice
Concretely, institutions implementing Recognition & Rewards principles have moved toward:
- Narrative CVs — career narratives that describe contributions in context, replacing or supplementing publication lists and journal-metric summaries in hiring, tenure, and promotion dossiers
- Reduced reliance on journal-level metrics — moving away from journal impact factor and similar proxies as stand-ins for the quality of an individual’s work, in line with DORA’s core recommendation
- Team science recognition — evaluating and crediting collaborative and team contributions explicitly, rather than assuming individual, single-author achievement as the norm
- Open science as a recognized activity — crediting data sharing, open-access publishing, and open software/methods development as legitimate parts of an academic contribution, not unrewarded extra work
- Diversified career paths — formal recognition that not every academic career needs to follow the same research-heavy trajectory to be valued and promoted
Because each institution implements these principles through its own policy rather than a single binding national standard, the degree of change varies. Some Dutch universities and university medical centres have rewritten formal promotion criteria; others have made more incremental changes to dossier templates and evaluation committee guidance. A research administrator evaluating a specific Dutch institution’s practice should check that institution’s own published career policy rather than assuming uniform national implementation.
Timeline and Milestones
- November 2019 — “Room for Everyone’s Talent” position paper published by VSNU (now UNL), NFU, KNAW, NWO, and ZonMw
- 2019–2022 — initial programme phase: institutions began developing local career policies and evaluation frameworks aligned with the five dimensions
- November 2023 — the roadmap “Room for Everyone’s Talent in Practice” was delivered to the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science, reporting on implementation progress across the sector
- Ongoing — the programme continues to run recurring national events (including a periodic Recognition & Rewards Festival) and to coordinate implementation guidance across participating institutions via recognitionrewards.nl
Because implementation is ongoing and decentralized, treat any specific institutional claim (e.g., “university X has fully removed impact factor from promotion criteria”) as something to verify against that institution’s current published policy rather than the national programme’s general framing — national programme documents describe the shared direction, not a guaranteed, uniform end-state at every institution.
How It Relates to DORA and CoARA
Recognition & Rewards, DORA, and CoARA share the same underlying critique of metrics-led research assessment, but they operate differently:
- DORA is a global declaration that individual institutions, funders, and publishers sign, committing broadly to not use journal-based metrics as a proxy for research quality in specific decisions.
- CoARA is a coalition that member organizations join by signing the CoARA Agreement, committing to a shared set of principles and a mutual-learning process across signatory organizations, with more structured commitments and timelines than DORA.
- Recognition & Rewards is a national programme run jointly by Dutch university associations, funders, and academies — not a document institutions sign, but a coordinated policy direction implemented through national funders and each institution’s own governance.
Many Dutch universities are separately both DORA signatories and CoARA members, and treat Recognition & Rewards as the national implementation vehicle for those international commitments — the three are complementary rather than competing frameworks. See our guide to how institutions are rewriting P&T criteria under DORA and CoARA for documented institutional cases, including Utrecht University’s specific policy changes under Recognition & Rewards.
Why This Matters for Research Administrators Outside the Netherlands
Recognition & Rewards is frequently referenced internationally as a working example of assessment reform implemented at national scale through funders and university associations, rather than through individual institutional pledges alone. For a research administrator or academic-policy office elsewhere, the programme is useful less as a template to copy wholesale — Dutch higher education’s coordination structure through national associations doesn’t map directly onto every country’s funding and governance system — and more as a reference case for questions that come up in any local reform effort: how to structure a narrative-CV template, how to define recognizable “impact” criteria without reintroducing a new set of gameable metrics, and how to sequence policy change so that funders and institutions move in a coordinated way rather than institutions reforming criteria a funder’s own review process still implicitly penalizes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Recognition & Rewards the same thing as DORA?
No. DORA is a global declaration that individual organizations sign. Recognition & Rewards is a Dutch national programme run jointly by university associations, funders, and academies. Many Dutch institutions participate in both, using Recognition & Rewards as their national implementation route for principles closely aligned with DORA’s.
Do individual researchers or institutions “sign” Recognition & Rewards?
No — unlike DORA or the CoARA Agreement, there is no public signatory list. It is a coordinated programme among five national organizations (UNL, NFU, KNAW, NWO, ZonMw), with implementation carried out through each institution’s own policy.
Has journal impact factor actually been removed from hiring and promotion in the Netherlands?
Some individual universities have removed journal impact factor from formal hiring and promotion criteria as part of implementing Recognition & Rewards principles — Utrecht University is the most documented example (see our guide on institutions rewriting P&T criteria). This is not a uniform, legally binding national rule; implementation varies by institution, so verify a specific university’s current policy directly rather than assuming national uniformity.
What is a narrative CV in this context?
A narrative CV describes an academic’s contributions and career trajectory in prose and context — what a person did, in what role, and what came of it — rather than relying primarily on a publication list, citation counts, or journal-level metrics to convey career strength. It is one of the concrete tools Recognition & Rewards promotes as an alternative or supplement to metrics-heavy dossiers.
Where can I find the programme’s official documentation?
The programme’s own site, recognitionrewards.nl, publishes the current programme plan, Q&A, and implementation guidance. The original 2019 position paper and related NWO documentation are also available directly from nwo.nl.
Sources
- Universities of the Netherlands (UNL)/NFU/KNAW/NWO/ZonMw, “Room for Everyone’s Talent” position paper (November 2019) — nwo.nl
- Recognition & Rewards programme office — recognitionrewards.nl
- NWO, “Recognition and Rewards” — nwo.nl
- DORA case study, “The Dutch Recognition & Rewards Programme” — sfdora.org
