Better Science Initiative: Sustainable research culture for all
The Better Science Initiative aims to rethink the notion of academic excellence and promotes best practices for a healthy research culture in which all researchers can thrive.
By Prof. Dr. Heike Mayer and Joel Schaad with Janet G. Hering
20 January 2026, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18171498
What is academic excellence? This question lies at the heart of the Better Science Initiative. How we define academic excellence shapes our understanding of research careers and researchers. Founded in 2020, the Better Science Initiative advocates for a fair and sustainable research culture. The initiative's core message is both simple and revolutionary: true academic excellence can only be achieved when sustainability, diversity, and equal opportunities form the foundation of academic work. With ten calls to action for researchers (see graphic), the Initiative highlights the need for both bottom-up and top-down action towards this ideal. Prof. Dr. Heike Mayer, Vice-rector Quality and Sustainable Development of the University of Bern [1], was a co-founder of the Initiative. She is Unit Leader for Economic Geography at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern.
How would you describe the key aspects of your initiative?
We identified five key drivers of the current problematic research culture. First, excellence is used as a placeholder term without clear criteria, often excluding diverse perspectives [2]. Second, the image of the "ideal scientist" is clearly gendered, which leads to imbalances as to who can succeed in their career. Third, career competition and rigid disciplinary boundaries lead to isolation among academics, which can have negative impacts on their mental health, especially for young researchers. Fourth, the narrative of "science as vocation" blurs work-life boundaries; constant availability is at odds with private care work and extra-university activities, which sometimes get deprioritized and receive little recognition. Finally, academic leaders are promoted primarily for scientific achievement rather than leadership skills, which can lead to management issues and conflict situations.
To counteract this, we developed ten calls to action that all members of academia can implement to create a diverse, sustainable, and "care-ful" research culture. Inspired by the slow science movement [3], these principles function both as a manifesto and a practical code of conduct.
How did you launch your initiative?
The Better Science Initiative was created by the working group “Critical Discourse on Excellence” at the University of Bern. The group consists of researchers from various fields and hierarchy levels. Its goal is to discuss the issues of academic excellence and research culture. In the several years of its existence, we have realized multiple projects, such as a portrait series showing the diversity of career paths of academic staff [4].
In 2020, we launched the Better Science website [5] and successfully secured funding for 2021-2024 through the university consortium swissuniversities [6]. The project involved six Swiss higher education institutions as cooperation partners: University of Bern, University of St. Gallen, University of Geneva, University of Lucerne, Zurich University of the Arts, and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. For the website, we collected a curated list of testimonials from researchers and other persons within the Swiss higher education system.
How do you keep your initiative going?
We maintain momentum through multiple channels – our website serves as a central hub collecting 150 testimonials and best practice examples, while we reached a global audience with our social media campaigns. We developed workshops which provide spaces to discuss and reflect the calls to action, and we created a pool of ambassador researchers who discussed the Initiative at various events. The key was our bottom-up approach combined with institutional support. We held 60 events at 20 universities and institutions, creating a loose network of researchers that enabled knowledge transfer and fostered ongoing discussions about research culture.
What are the main accomplishments of your initiative thus far?
The Better Science Initiative project has established itself as an awareness-raising platform and best practice collection [7]. Over the last four years, we reached hundreds of researchers in Switzerland and abroad. In addition to about 700 individual signatories [8], the call for action was signed by several institutions – including the Vetsuisse Faculty at University of Bern and the Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) – as well as by a few staff organizations. The Zurich University of the Arts incorporated our principles into their code of conduct discussions, and multiple universities are using our framework to strengthen work-life integration policies. My own institute (GIUB) adapted its hiring guidelines and evaluation criteria for professors based on the Better Science principles.
Our project highlights various paradoxes that researchers navigate daily, such as the tension between collaboration and competition, or between viewing research as a vocation versus as a profession. The initiative also generated valuable research, including a survey on research culture at participating universities and an analysis of existing studies on Swiss university research culture, creating a knowledge base for future institutional reforms. Overall, I think we succeeded in demonstrating that equal opportunities and academic excellence need to be considered together.
What do you see as the future of your initiative?
The initiative demonstrated that bottom-up cultural change is possible, but it requires sustained commitment from individuals and institutions. At the University of Bern, we will be developing a concise instrument to facilitate better science through improved team culture in research groups. Inclusive teams have a healthy error culture, foster a diversity of perspectives and enable collective learning. In this way, we aim to lay the foundation for a sustained discussion of values that underlie our research system. We expect to make this instrument available through our website.
How should readers contact you if they want to participate in or support your initiative?
We are present on social media (LinkedIn, Instagram). Subscribe to the calls to action to make your commitment visible and reach out if you would like to host a workshop or a talk: info@betterscience.ch.
Conclusions and questions for further thought
On behalf of this blog series, I would like to thank Heike and Joel for taking the time to describe their initiative. I appreciate it very much that the Better Science Initiative is not gender specific. Our guest post [9] on the 2024 book Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University was similarly inclusive. As Patricia Maurice and I highlighted in a previous post, improving the STEMM academic working environment doesn’t need to be treated as a zero-sum game (“It’s Not Pie…” [10]). Universities need to engage faculty and students from a broad range of backgrounds to address pressing problems across society, which are often experienced differently by different societal groups and require diverse perspectives so that potential solutions are not overlooked [11]. Society cannot afford to waste the resources expended on educating and training women and members of other under-represented groups; this happens when they are isolated and excluded, sometimes to the point of leaving academia or even STEMM fields altogether [12]. Rather, as the Better Science Initiative shows, all of us can contribute to a research culture in which academic excellence and equitable, sustainable research practices are not opposing forces but mutually reinforcing elements of truly excellent scholarship.
Some questions for further thought and discussion are:
· What is the one thing you will start doing differently, starting tomorrow?
· Would you be willing to sign the Better Science Initiative call to action?
· How might your institution be persuaded to sign the Better Science Initiative call to action?
References and notes:
[1] https://www.geography.unibe.ch/about_us/staff/prof_dr_mayer_heike/index_eng.html (accessed September 16, 2025), https://www.unibe.ch/university/organization/executive_board_and_central_administration/vice_rectorate_quality_and_sustainable_development/prof_dr_mayer_heike/index_eng.html (accessed September 16, 2025)
[2] Moore, S., Neylon, C., Eve, M.P, O’Donnell, D.P. and Pattinson, D. (2017) “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence. Palgrave Communications 3: 16105. https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.105
[3] Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., … Curran, W. (2015). For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(4), 1235–1259. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v14i4.1058
[4] Exzellenz ist vielfältig (2023) https://www.karrierewege.unibe.ch/ (in German, accessed September 19, 2025).
[5] Better Science Initiative, https://betterscience.ch/en/#/ (accessed September 19, 2025).
[6] Swissuniversities, https://www.swissuniversities.ch/en/ (accessed September 19, 2025)
[7] Final report Better Science Initiative 2021-2024, University of Bern Equal Opportunities Office, https://betterscience.ch/assets/images/design/BSI-Final-report.pdf
[8] https://betterscience.ch/en/calls-to-action/#/, institutional signatories indicated with blue highlighting (accessed September 19, 2025).
[11] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/engagement-and-the-ability-to-work-effectively-in-a-diverse-world
[12] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/why-and-how-i-co-authored-the-comment-sexism-in-academia