Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research aims to provide recognition and publicity for outstanding efforts that enhance the rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency of research in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and stimulate awareness and activities fostering research quality among scientists, institutions, funders, and politicians.

Award Categories

• They annually welcome applications and nominations for a €500,000 award across three categories.
  • Individual Award: Individual researchers or small teams of collaborating researchers can be nominated. The laureate will be awarded €200,000.
  • Institutional Award: Governmental and non-governmental organizations, institutions, or other entities can apply or be nominated. The award-winning organization or institution will receive €200,000.
  • Early Career Award: Early career researchers or small teams of collaborating researchers can submit a project proposal that seeks to foster research quality and value for an award of €100,000.

What they Honor?

• The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research honours outstanding contributions to advancing the rigor, reliability, and transparency of research.
  • Fostering Research Integrity
    • Substantial contributions to research integrity through outstanding measures, such as enhancing transparency, promoting access to research results (‘Open Science’), and embracing collaborative research (‘Team Science’).
  • Quality-Improving Interventions
    • Developing and/or implementing interventions, governance, and policies that enhance the quality and reliability of research.
  • Groundbreaking Research on Research
    • to identify opportunities for improving research practice, generating evidence for potential interventions, and developing metrics and policies that incentivize the adoption of best possible research practices.
  • Innovative Approaches to Research Integrity
    • Developing innovative approaches that foster research on research integrity, conducting and designing novel measures or programs to prevent misconduct, and safeguarding validity and reliability in science and research.
  • Addressing Systemic Factors
    • Identifying and addressing systemic factors that foster research integrity and more responsible research.
  • Replications
    • Performing or supporting studies on the reproducibility of scientific results.
  • Teaching Good Research Practice
    • Making a significant contribution to the teaching of good research practice.
  • Improving Research Assessment and Incentives
    • Identifying research standards and incentives that directly or indirectly constrain the quality of research (e.g. reliance on purely quantitative output measures) and designing more adequate means to assess the quality of research and researchers.
  • Exceptional Integrity
    • Demonstrating exceptional integrity when facing difficult circumstances and/or conflicts of interest.
  • Increasing Diversity in Research
    • Making a significant contribution to increasing the diversity of research by considering aspects such as gender, race/ethnicity, geography, career stage, etc.
  • Long-Term Archiving
    • Guaranteeing the long-term archiving of data and publications through intergenerational archives.

Eligibility Criteria

• The award is open to researchers and institutions from any part of the world. Applicants do not need to be affiliated with a German institution or be working in partnership with Berlin- or German-based institutions or researchers.

For more information, visit Einstein Foundation Berlin.