Australia’s national health research funder has acted to restrict assessment of each applicant to its marque research competitions to only 10 publications from the last decade.

At most, just 10. Let that sink in.

No need to maintain or submit a Common CV to detail every sliver of every publication, engagement, or talk you were ever even tangentially part of. No journal impacts or H-index. Just 10 publications over 10 years.

 What led to this bold leadership move from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)? The council clarified: it’s about valuing research quality over quantity. Truly incentivizing research that is rigorous, transparent, and reproducible. Contribution is crucial: applicants must not only explain how each publication contributed knowledge and quality, but also convey the publication’s impact and its contributions to their leadership.

That movement you now feel are the heavyweights of Canada’s research community shifting uneasily in their (endowed) chairs. What to lean your external credibility and inner confidence on if it’s not your 220 publications? It may also be the indignation of departments and institutions which for years have predicated their reward structures, celebrations, and identities on doing lots of research.

Yet, this change heralds no doomsday — it’s change the world urgently needs.

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