London now shuns journal-based metrics in staff assessment; it relies more on peer judgement of research quality. At Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, all staff sign the university's code of good governance, agreeing to uphold integrity, impartiality and social responsibility, for example. These are just three of dozens of efforts we found when investigating how institutions worldwide are working to improve research integrity. They form part of our long-term study on this topic, a project that is funded by the European Commission (see Table S2 in Supplementary information for more examples).

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Interdisciplinarity is often framed as crucial for addressing the complex problems of contemporary society and for achieving new levels of innovation. But while science policy and institutions have provided a variety of incentives for stimulating interdisciplinary work throughout Europe, there is also growing evidence that some aspects of the academic system do not necessarily reward interdisciplinary work. In this study, we explore how mid-career researchers in an environmental science research center in Sweden relate to and handle the distinct forms of uncertainty that arise from conflicting institutional and policy impulses. Our material suggests that interdisciplinary academics are often confronted with and at times themselves operate with a surprisingly dichotomous, value-laden view of their research practice. Disciplinarity is primarily associated with the ideals of scientific rigor, while interdisciplinarity becomes conflated with application-oriented work and a lack of 'theory.' We also draw attention to the underlying practical dynamics that reproduce this tension and entangle it with the very process of academic socialization. Specifically, we analyze the ambivalent consequences of the various work-arounds that researchers rely on to carve out opportunities for ongoing interdisciplinary research within heterogeneous funding landscapes. These tactics turn out to be undermined by the overriding normative power of formal career incentives at universities, which continue to emphasize the ideals of the individual high-performing academic who publishes in disciplinary journals and attracts the most selective grants. Under such * Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner circumstances, the work-arounds themselves become an insidious mechanism that allows researchers to stay in academia but systematically marginalizes their voices and epistemic ambitions in the process.

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Digital humanities scholarship has regularly challenged characteristic organizational features of academic life in the humanities. For example, it is typically practiced in larger collaborative projects that produce output very different from the traditional scholarly monograph. Digital humanists often present their work in strikingly reflexive accounts that are reminiscent of what science and technology studies scholars have called infrastructural inversion, a method that defamiliarizes the socio-material infrastructure of research to expose the inner workings of knowledge production. At first sight, infrastructural inversion might seem to constitute the opposite of the older concept of articulation work, which designates the situated activity of coordinating and managing cooperative work processes. It is more useful, however, to think about infrastructural inversion as a specific form of articulation work. The inversions performed by digital scholars serve to highlight and problematize established ways of streamlining articulation work, for example, through the established model of peer review, or by using conventional forms of scholarly output. In turn, such systematic defamiliarization opens up new and potentially competing ways of imagining the organization of articulation work.

In this article, we study the use of curricula vitae (CV) for competitive funding decisions in science. The typically sober administrative style of academic résumés evokes the impression of straightforwardly conveyed, objective evidence on which to base comparisons of past achievements and future potentials. We instead conceptualize the evaluation of biographical evidence as a generative interplay between an historically grown, administrative infrastructure (the CV), and a situated evaluative practice in which the representational function of that infrastructure is itself interpreted and established. The use of CVs in peer review can be seen as a doubly comparative practice, where referees compare not only applicants (among each other or to an imagined ideal of excellence), but also their own experience-based understanding of practice and the conceptual assumptions that underpin CV categories. Empirically, we add to existing literature on peer review by drawing attention to self-correcting mechanisms in the reproduction of the scientific workforce. Conceptually, we distinguish three modalities of how the doubly comparative use of CVs can shape the assessment of applicants: calibration, branching out, and repair. The outcome of this reflexive work should not be seen as predetermined by situational pressures. In fact, bibliographic categories such as authorship of publications or performance metrics may themselves come to be problematized and reshaped in the process.

In this paper, we analyze the role of science and technology studies (STS) journal editors in organizing and maintaining the peer review economy. We specifically conceptualize peer review as a gift economy running on perpetually renewed experiences of mutual indebtedness among members of an intellectual community. While the peer review system is conventionally presented as self-regulating, we draw attention to its vulnerabilities and to the essential curating function of editors. Aside from inherent complexities, there are various shifts in the broader political–economic and sociotechnical organization of scholarly publishing that have recently made it more difficult for editors to organize robust cycles of gift exchange. This includes the increasing importance of journal metrics and associated changes in authorship practices; the growth and differentiation of the STS journal landscape; and changes in publishing funding models and the structure of the publishing market through which interactions among authors, editors, and reviewers are reconfigured. To maintain a functioning peer review economy in the face of numerous pressures, editors must balance contradictory imperatives: the need to triage intellectual production and rely on established cycles of gift exchange for efficiency, and the need to expand cycles of gift exchange to ensure the sustainability and diversity of the peer review economy.

A recent trend in European science policy is the attempt to influence academic research agendas through mission-oriented funding programs. Under the label of 'grand challenges', these aim to stimulate knowledge and technology deemed crucial to society, but unlikely to develop from corporate R&D and traditionally funded research. This paper takes a detailed look at the mechanisms through which academics in two German university departments integrate such funding into their research agendas. The first department focuses on electromobility research, and the other one on sustainable biotechnological alternatives for industrial petrochemistry. The paper highlights an illacknowledged tension between the normative goals of grand challenges and the practical uncertainty that reliance on such funding creates for recipients. While formally incentivizing the production of highly innovative technologies, the often unclear timeframe of mission-oriented grants and the hard-to-predict behavior of commercial actors pose a counter-incentive for academics to limit their commitment to ambitious research agendas.