The multiple project of today's scientists: Maneuvering between personal requirements, financial dependence, and formal excellence

Abstract

The concept of "project", that usually implicitly refers to "scientific project", has spread invasively in the daily life of academic scientific research. This noticeably started in 2000, after the European Council promoted through the Lisbon strategy the allocation of research funds on a competitive basis, for example opening calls for project proposals and providing financial support to top-ranked ones only. Nevertheless, project proponents rarely question what a project actually is. Three non-exclusive definitions of the concept are proposed in this paper. First, a scientific project can be "essential", when it agrees with the way scientists consider how science works in theory and satisfies personal methodological requirements. Second, a scientific project can be "aspirant", when it is specifically formatted to fit project selection criteria, those of open calls and funding programs for example, and in order to outcompete rival proposals. Third, a scientific project can be "coopetitive", when it is a mean to boost personal carreer in an evaluation context mostly based on quantitative scientific production. Theoretically, it can be expected that today's scientists manage a "multiple"project that would combine various objectives corresponding to these types of project. However, the coexistence of potentially antagonist objectives (e.g. quality versus quantity) could raise internal conflicts. Then, regaining personal balance might require to selectively drop some objectives. Depending on those that are maintained, this could impact the quality of future science work as well as the role that science could play in societal debates.