Rewarding and recognising Team Infrastructure Roles: Successes and failures so far?

Slides for the reversed panel for Big Team Science Conference 2023, presented by Danny, Esther and Anne on 25 October 2023.

Team Infrastructure Roles (roles that support research through specialized skills) are vital to the modern scientific enterprise, but the reward and recognition system for people in these roles needs development if we are to support people to have sustainable and successful careers. In a recent publication titled "A manifesto for rewarding and recognising Team Infrastructure Roles" (https://doi.org/10.53962/knm3-bnvx), we suggested four systems-level changes that we believe are needed if we are to address existing issues with the reward and recognition available to TIRs: 

1. Shift the focus of academic research to appropriately value the process of the endeavor, not only the prestige of the outputs.
2. Expand the system for recognizing contributions, going beyond the implementation of CRediT, by acknowledging contributions that are not visible in the form of authorship.
3. Create mechanisms for validating the quality and impact of non-journal outputs akin to peer review.
4. Standardise and professionalize roles and pathways for career development.

In this reverse-panel (a panel where the panelists ask questions of the audience), we invite panelists and attendees to share their practical experiences of examples where the above changes have been tried. What has worked? What has failed? What do we need to support in order to ensure their wider adoption?

Our hope from this session is to share concrete examples of systems which attempt to better reward and recognise TIRs, so that we can all learn from our collective successes and failures to date, with the goal of adding these examples (where appropriate) to the documentation within The Turing Way.