DORA Announces Three-Year Plan For Research Assessment Reform

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, DORA, a statement of principles and organization, has promoted global research evaluation reform and received extensive support since its inception in 2013. According to its website, 20,044 individuals and organizations in 160 countries have signed DORA, demonstrating its commitment to responsible research assessment.

To advance its efforts, the organization announced its new three-year strategic plan, which consists of four objectives designed to guide DORA’s work through 2026. These goals will reinforce the organization’s vision “to advance practical and robust approaches to research assessment globally and across all scholarly disciplines.”

The objectives are to increase awareness of the harm from research assessments that depend on inappropriate metrics, and the benefits of other evaluation efforts. The overall intent is to advance the development of clear and concrete measures to improve research assessment, to support advocates for research evaluation reform and to gain funding that will help further the organization’s mission.

“There remains a pressing need to increase the scale, pace and impact of reform, and to ensure that commitment to the declaration on paper results in meaningful change on the ground,” the strategic plan reads.

To help form its plan, DORA’s steering committee of publishers, researchers and other qualified individuals sought out guidance from the global research community by distributing a survey and conducting several informal interviews.

The organization released its first strategic plan in 2018 and was able to achieve the goals it set by increasing awareness of DORA, promoting the use of tools to implement reform and expanding the scope of the organization.

“We have been much more proactive as an organization in moving the debate along through hosting meetings and turning up at other conferences and collaborating with other organizations, learned societies and founders to develop alternative, more robust approaches to deliver a more holistic approach to research assessment,” said Stephen Curry, DORA chair, in a 2022 interview with Social Science Space.

Read the full strategic plan here: DORA Strategic Plan 2023-2026 FINAL (sfdora.org)