When to apply When the institution is implementing DORA, signing the COARA reform agreement, or replacing impact-factor-based assessment with narrative CVs and structured contribution claims.
Before you start
Prerequisites
What needs to be in place before you operationalise Responsible research assessment terminology in your CRIS or repository.
- An institutional commitment to DORA or to the COARA reform agreement, with a policy statement that translates the commitment into local practice
- A CRIS or researcher-profile platform that can hold structured narrative-CV-style records, not just publication lists
- A controlled vocabulary for contribution-claim types (knowledge generation, individuals developed, research community, broader society)
- Familiarity with the UKRI R4RI, Royal Society Résumé, Dutch Recognition and Rewards, and Wellcome narrative-CV formats
- An institutional position on impact factor, h-index, and metrics — do they appear in promotion files, in funding-eligibility filters, or nowhere?
Deployment
Five steps to deploy
Each step is small enough to land in a single sprint or a single sitting with the relevant CRIS administrator. Follow in order.
Adopt the four-section narrative-CV structure as the institutional default
Contributions to the generation of knowledge / to the development of individuals / to the wider research community / to the broader society. This structure is shared across UKRI R4RI, Royal Society Résumé, Recognition and Rewards, and Wellcome. Map your existing fields against it.
Replace impact-factor displays on researcher profiles
Remove journal impact factor and h-index from default profile views. Keep them accessible for individual researchers to view their own metrics if they wish, but do not surface them in profile displays, promotion files, or funding-eligibility tools.
Wire structured contribution claims
Each contribution claim is a structured record: section (1-4), claim_summary (max 200 words), supporting_evidence (multi-link to outputs, datasets, supervision records, engagement events, peer-review activities), date_range. Researchers maintain claims continuously rather than reconstructing them at assessment time.
Configure narrative-CV export templates
Build templates that populate the four-section structure from structured records — outputs and CRediT roles into section 1, supervision and mentorship into section 2, peer review and editorial roles into section 3, engagement and policy uptake into section 4. Researcher edits prose; the structured evidence is pre-filled.
Pilot in one promotion round
Run a promotion round in which the narrative CV is required and the impact-factor display is suppressed. Survey applicants and panel members on burden, comparability, and satisfaction. Iterate the templates and the contribution-claim categories.
Worked example
Sample workflow
A realistic walk-through of a single record passing through the Responsible research assessment pipeline once the checklist is in production.
Integration points
CRIS and repository systems
Vendor-specific notes on where this vocabulary fits in real research-information systems. Names appear here only where there is public field evidence — they are not vendor partnerships.
R4RI and Royal Society narrative-CV export plugins available; configure the four-section mapping against the existing Person and Output fields.
The Elements Reporting Database supports the four-section aggregation; the public profile pages can be configured to suppress impact-factor displays.
Native expression of multi-section researcher profiles via the VIVO-ISF ontology; well-suited to public-facing narrative researcher profiles.
Researcher profile and CV-export modules support the narrative-CV pattern; integration with the promotion-workflow module covers the full assessment cycle.
Federation target — peer-review activities, employments, and works should round-trip to ORCID so the narrative-CV evidence is independently discoverable.
What goes wrong in the field
Common pitfalls
The patterns that show up repeatedly when this checklist is skipped or misapplied. Address these before they become entrenched.
- Adopting DORA in policy while continuing to display impact factors on researcher profiles
- Treating the narrative CV as a free-text Word document, abandoning the structured CRIS data that should populate it
- Letting the four-section structure be a relabelling of the publication list rather than a genuine reframing of contribution
- Failing to import peer-review activity from ORCID, leaving the "wider research community" section empty by default
- Running a narrative-CV promotion round without training the assessment panel, so panel members default to counting publications under the new labels
Frequently asked
Implementation FAQ
- Who maintains this checklist?
- The Responsible research assessment working group maintains the checklist alongside the dictionary terms in the same domain. It is reviewed each release cycle (March and September) and updated when a working-group consultation, a vendor product change, or a federation-partner schema update materially changes the operational guidance.
- What if my CRIS or repository is not listed?
- The integration points listed name the systems CASRAI has direct field experience with — Pure, Symplectic Elements, Worktribe, Converis, DSpace and DSpace-CRIS, EPrints, VIVO, Dataverse, Invenio-RDM. The CERIF mapping in the checklist is vendor-neutral and applies equally to other CRIS or repository products. If your system supports the underlying entities (Person, Project, Output, Funding, plus the domain-specific extensions), the steps transfer.
- How do I validate my implementation?
- Three validation surfaces. First, the deposit form should refuse a record missing required fields rather than warn and accept. Second, the resulting metadata should round-trip through the federation layer your institution uses (OpenAIRE Guidelines 4.0 for European federation, DataCite Commons for DOI-anchored discovery, Crossref for article-anchored discovery) without upstream errors. Third, walk a real-world record through the sample-workflow path on this page and confirm the structured fields capture what the prose describes.
- Where do I report errors in the checklist?
- Open a comment via the dictionary-feedback flow at /dictionary/contribute. Editorial corrections — wrong vendor module names, deprecated standards, broken integration paths — are queued into the next release cycle. Substantive disagreements on the operational guidance are routed to the working group for review and may motivate a checklist revision.
- Is this checklist enough to certify my implementation?
- No. The checklist gives you the operational baseline; certification against federation profiles (CoreTrustSeal, OpenAIRE-compliant, COAR-aligned) is a separate process with its own audit. Treat the checklist as the engineering scaffolding and the certification as the institutional sign-off that the scaffolding is being used.
