DORA at 10: A decade of advocacy for redefining research assessment

This year, on May 16, 2023, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) will celebrate its 10^th Anniversary. Developed in response to the growing need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research were evaluated, DORA has become a worldwide initiative across all scholarly disciplines and with key stakeholders, including funders, publishers, professional societies, institutions, and individual researchers. To date, 23,059 individuals and organizations from 160 countries have signed DORA.

“In addition to researchers, DORA welcomes librarians, university staff, research managers, journal editors, staff from funding agencies, staff from research related non-profit organizations, etc. to sign…[the declaration.]”
—DORA

As the global research landscape evolves to address rising societal concerns and needs, researchers — the great minds we collectively turn to for our solutions — are pressured to perform and function in a system that is becoming increasingly non-functional. The metrics for hiring, tenure and promotion, and funding are predominantly tethered to a researcher’s publication record, specifically the impact factor of the journals in which they publish.

The most notable issue with this approach is that the journal impact factor was first designed as a tool to assist librarians in identifying which journal subscriptions to purchase, not to evaluate the merit or quality of a research paper, let alone an academic’s entire research program or the impact of their career. The true purpose of the impact factor has long since drifted from its original intent, and with its adoption as a defining metric in the outcomes of funding and academic career advancement, it has become integrated into the culture of scientific research and, consequently, produced a systemic bias in the scholarly publishing industry. At Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) we have acknowledged that this is a flawed approach to evaluating research and, along with DORA and its signatories (including CSP), advocate for the removal of journal-based metrics in the evaluation of a researcher’s scientific contribution or productivity, and in situations of funding.

Projects such as DORA’s Tools to Advance Research Assessment (TARA) propose the development of alternative policies to evaluate academic career assessment, while best practices, calls to action, and mandates such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, Plan S, Canada’s Open Science Action Plan, and the new Nelson Memo in the US are focusing on targets far beyond journal metrics. They all point to the critical need for open and accessible scholarly findings, because access to information that can inform progress towards a sustainable future is essential to developing the strategies required to achieve those goals. Early-career researchers are becoming an increasingly values-based population of stakeholders in the scholarly publishing landscape, and they are quickly recognizing that creating a better future requires advancing open access publishing in an economically, environmentally, and socially responsible manner — all of which should be independent of the journal impact factor.

When you take the impact factor out of the equation, researchers are free to publish their work in journals where they know their community is active and their research will have the most impact. They are free to share their research without worrying about whether they will be penalized on their next research grant proposal or promotion package for not publishing in journals with high enough impact factors, where their findings may be undiscoverable by the communities who would most benefit from them. After all, if you publish in a journal solely because of its impact factor, but your research is inequitably disseminated, diluted by trendy research topics, and/or inaccessible to the communities most relevant to your work, how impactful is it, really?

If adding impressive journal metrics (which are calculated without full transparency) to a CV is the only way to further an academic career, and if funding is heavily weighted on academic advancement, then the value of research and shared knowledge lies with high impact factor journals and their publishers, not with the research itself.

The success and future of the scholarly publishing industry, and scholarly communication in general, is dependent on the contributions and collaborations of stakeholders across an array of research-centered sectors to meet shared goals. Now more than ever, in a time of growing mistrust in science and misinformation, researchers should have the freedom to contribute to these shared goals unencumbered by institutions’ misuse of journal metrics.  As DORA turns 10, and as the world turns to science for answers, researchers on the front line are waiting for support in the form of redefined measures of assessment, hoping that revamped policies and best practices don’t take another 10 years to arrive.

The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) was developed in 2012 during the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco vision to advance practical and robust approaches to research assessment across all scholarly disciplines. It has since been adopted internationally by funders, publishers, professional societies, institutions, and researchers.

To celebrate the 10^th anniversary, DORA is launching a week of events from May 12^th—19^th, 2023. Most events are offered both in-person and online, and are open to the international community. To register for an event, visit DORA’s website.