Nominations open for Einstein Award for Promoting Quality in Research

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

Categories

• The award is presented in three categories:
  • The Individual Award: honors individual researchers or small teams of collaborating researchers.
  • The Institutional Award: recognizes organizations and research institutions.
  • The Early Career Award: highlights innovative project proposals by researchers at the beginning of their careers.

Objectives

• The contributions should align with the following objectives:
  • Reproducibility & Research Quality:
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • Exceptional Integrity: Demonstrating exceptional integrity when facing difficult circumstances and/or conflicts of interest.
    • Long-Term Archiving: Guaranteeing the long-term archiving of data and publications through intergenerational archives.
    • 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.
  • MetaScience:
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • Accessibility and Inclusion:
    • 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.

Prize Information

• The 2025 winners will be awarded €350,000.
• Individual Award: The laureate will be awarded €150,000.
• Institutional Award: The award-winning organization or institution will receive €100,000.
• 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.

Eligibility Criteria

• Researchers and institutions worldwide that are engaged in science, research, education, and scholarship are encouraged to participate in this award. It acknowledges outstanding contributions to advancing the rigor, reliability, and transparency of research. They warmly welcome applications and nominations from marginalized and underrepresented groups.

For more information, visit Einstein Foundation Berlin.