D5.3: Final Evaluation and Impact Assessment Report

The current document, titled “Final Evaluation and Impact Assessment Report”, has been developed within the framework of the TIME4CS project which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 101006201. 

Evaluation and impact assessment activities in TIME4CS aim to:

●        jointly assess the progress of implemented institutional changes in the participating organisations and understand mutual learning effects between Front-Runners and Implementers of the project.

●        provide research performing organisations (RPOs) and research funding organisations (RFOs) with a monitoring toolkit to self-assess and monitor their progress towards organisational change (see D5.4 Monitoring Toolkit for RFOs and RPOs)

●        learn about the implementation process of institutional changes in implementing organisations to understand the different pathways taken within the organisations and their intended and unintended consequences.

In TIME4CS, evaluation was integrated in all project activities from the very beginning - in a first step we elaborated an Evaluation and Impact Assessment plan (D5.1: Evaluation and Impact Assessment Plan) together with representatives from the four implementing organisations - CRG, KTU, UniSR and Tyndall (which we call Implementers in this deliverable). This plan defined key indicators for the summative and formative evaluation, as well as evaluation instruments and a timeline. Also, a stock-taking exercise with the Implementers helped to understand the baseline before implementing the Roadmaps and Grounding Actions. Based on the initial planning and an interim stock taking, we elaborated an Interim Impact Assessment report in year 2 (D5.2 Interim Evaluation and Impact Assessment Report The main insight was the fact that the Implementers faced several challenges related to the integration of Citizen Science in their research activities. Nonetheless, Implementers had succeeded in triggering first institutional changes to support Citizen Science. In every implementer organisation “core teams” with representatives of different research support services had started to form, plan and continually adapt the Grounding Actions to the given circumstances.