CoARA Signatories

An organisation that has formally signed the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment and thereby joined the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), as distinct from an organisation that merely endorses the Agreement's principles informally.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 23 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A national research funding agency signs the Agreement, appears on the CoARA membership list under its country's entry, and publishes its action plan within the required window.

Is an instance

A university and its national funding council each sign independently and both appear as separate signatories, since signing is tied to an organisation's own legal status rather than to a single national-level commitment.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

An individual researcher who personally supports CoARA's principles is not a signatory -- the Agreement is not open to individual persons.

Not an instance

A commercial analytics or publishing vendor that references CoARA's principles in its marketing materials is not a signatory -- commercial entities are explicitly excluded from membership.

A CoARA signatory is an organisation that has formally signed the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment and thereby joined the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). Signing is an institutional act, not an individual one: only bodies with independent legal status can sign, including universities and their associations, research funders, academies and learned societies, research infrastructures, and national or regional research-assessment authorities. CoARA states explicitly that the Agreement and the Coalition are not open to individual researchers or to commercial entities.

Becoming a signatory carries the same substantive obligations as CoARA membership generally: committing to the Agreement’s shared vision and its ten reform commitments, and publishing an organisational action plan describing how those commitments will be implemented locally, with periodic self-reported progress updates. The distinction the term “signatory” draws is administrative rather than substantive — it identifies who has actually joined, as opposed to who merely agrees with the Agreement’s principles without formally signing.

How many signatories, and where the list lives

The signatory count has grown continuously since the Agreement was finalised in July 2022: roughly 350 organisations took part in the original consultation, 423 constituted CoARA at its December 2022 launch, and the roster had grown to more than 800 organisations across over 40 countries by mid-2026. Because the list changes on an ongoing basis, CASRAI does not attempt to reproduce it here. The CoARA Secretariat maintains the authoritative, searchable roster — organised by country and organisation type — on the coara.org membership pages, and independent tracking tools such as Leiden Madtrics’ CoARA signatory tracker mirror it for research and analysis purposes.

Examples

A national research funding agency signs the Agreement, appears on the CoARA membership list under its country’s entry, and publishes its action plan within the required window.
A university and its national funding council each sign independently and both appear as separate signatories, since signing is tied to an organisation’s own legal status rather than to a single national-level commitment.

Counter-examples

An individual researcher who personally supports CoARA’s principles is not a signatory — the Agreement is not open to individual persons.
A commercial analytics or publishing vendor that references CoARA’s principles in its marketing materials is not a signatory — commercial entities are explicitly excluded from membership.

References

CoARA Secretariat. “Membership.” coara.org/coalition/membership (accessed July 2026).
CoARA. “Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment,” full text, coara.org/agreement/the-agreement-full-text (2022).

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="CoARA Signatories"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/coara-signatories" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/coara-signatories",
  "name": "CoARA Signatories",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/coara-signatories",
  "description": "An organisation that has formally signed the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment and thereby joined the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), as distinct from an organisation that merely endorses the Agreement's principles informally.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/responsible-assessment#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/coara-signatories",
  "sameAs": [],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-23T07:34:59",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}