CoARA — the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment — is the international coalition of universities, funders, academies, and research infrastructures that have agreed to reform how research, researchers, and research organisations are evaluated. This guide brings together CASRAI’s full coverage of CoARA: what the coalition is, where it came from, what signing the Agreement actually commits an institution to, how it compares to DORA and the Leiden Manifesto, and the growing network of national and regional chapters implementing it around the world.
What Is CoARA?
CoARA is a coalition, not a single declaration or metric standard. Member organisations — universities and their associations, research funders, academies and learned societies, research infrastructures, and national or regional research-assessment authorities — sign the CoARA Agreement and commit to reforming their own assessment practices for hiring, promotion, funding decisions, and institutional evaluation. Membership is institutional: CoARA does not accept individual researchers or commercial entities as signatories (source: coara.org/coalition/membership).
For a short, single-paragraph definition, see the CASRAI Dictionary entry: CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment).
Origins: From a Co-Creation Process to a Global Coalition
CoARA grew out of a European drafting process that began in January 2022, coordinated with Science Europe and the European Commission, and run as an open co-creation exercise involving research organisations across Europe and beyond. The resulting text, the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (often referenced by the acronym ARRA), was presented in near-final form at a Stakeholder Assembly on 8 July 2022, with more than 350 organisations from over 40 countries already engaged in shaping it, and finalised shortly afterward (source: scienceeurope.org and coara.org’s own account of the Agreement’s history).
The Coalition itself launched formally in December 2022 with 423 founding signatories. Membership has grown substantially since — coara.org reported roughly 840 member organisations as of mid-2026, though this figure changes continuously and should be checked directly at coara.org/coalition/membership before being cited as current. For the mechanics of who is eligible to join and how the roster is organised, see CoARA Signatories.
The Ten Commitments of the CoARA Agreement
Signing the Agreement means committing to ten specific principles, set out on coara.org’s own “Commitments” page. In summary, signatories commit to:
- Recognise diverse research contributions and careers — broadening recognition beyond traditional outputs to include varied practices, outputs, and roles.
- Prioritise qualitative evaluation, with peer review central — supported by responsible and contextual use of quantitative indicators, not replaced by them.
- Abandon inappropriate uses of journal- and publication-based metrics — specifically moving away from the Journal Impact Factor, Article Influence Score, and h-index as direct proxies for quality.
- Avoid the use of university rankings in the assessment of individual researchers or research units.
- Commit the resources needed — budget and staff capacity — to implement the reform.
- Review and develop assessment criteria for research units, institutions, projects, and individual researchers and teams, involving relevant stakeholders.
- Raise awareness and provide training on assessment reform for everyone involved in the process, including reviewers, panels, and committees.
- Exchange practices and experiences to enable mutual learning within and beyond the Coalition, avoiding duplicated or fragmented effort.
- Communicate progress regularly to relevant communities on adherence to the Agreement’s principles and commitments.
- Evaluate assessment reform itself using rigorous methods, making the resulting evidence openly available.
The Agreement is deliberately non-prescriptive about pace: organisations “decide on the steps to take to implement the commitments and the pace in their reform journey, which can vary depending on the context” (coara.org). There is no single fixed deadline for every signatory — implementation is tracked through each institution’s own action plan rather than a uniform calendar. For the full text of the CoARA Agreement and how it is typically summarised in practice, see CoARA Agreement.
What Signing Actually Means for an Institution
In practice, signing the CoARA Agreement obligates an institution to produce and publish an action plan describing how it will implement the ten commitments, and to report periodically on progress. For most research-administration offices, the most visible consequence is a review of promotion and tenure (P&T) criteria: replacing journal-level metrics and publication counts as primary evaluation proxies with structured, qualitative peer assessment that can still draw on quantitative indicators where they are used responsibly and in context.
An independent 2026 content analysis of 248 publicly available CoARA action plans (Rushforth et al., Scientometrics, 2026) found real but uneven follow-through: action plans consistently state the Agreement’s values, but concrete operational changes to promotion criteria, hiring panels, and evaluation forms lag further behind. That is a useful reality check for any institution comparing its own reform pace to the wider Coalition — see CASRAI’s practical, cross-institutional look at how P&T criteria are actually being rewritten: DORA and CoARA in Practice: How Institutions Are Actually Rewriting P&T Criteria.
CoARA vs. DORA vs. the Leiden Manifesto
These three reference points are often mentioned together, but they are not the same kind of thing:
- DORA (the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, 2012) is a declaration, open to individual and organisational signatories alike, focused specifically on eliminating the misuse of the Journal Impact Factor and similar journal-level metrics in evaluating individual researchers’ work.
- The Leiden Manifesto (Hicks, Wouters, Waltman, de Rijcke & Rafols, Nature, 2015) is a set of ten principles for the responsible use of bibliometric indicators in research evaluation. It is not a signable coalition or agreement at all — it is guidance that both DORA and CoARA draw on.
- CoARA (2022) is the broadest of the three: an institutional coalition, not a declaration open to individuals, that addresses the whole research-assessment system — hiring, promotion, funding decisions, and institutional evaluation — rather than journal metrics alone, and requires signatories to commit resources and produce an implementation plan.
Many institutions treat DORA-signing and CoARA-signing as complementary rather than either/or — a large share of CoARA signatories are also DORA signatories. For a structured side-by-side comparison of what each actually commits an institution to, see DORA vs CoARA and DORA and CoARA: Comparing Research Assessment Reform Commitments.
CoARA by Country and Region: National Chapters
CoARA’s implementation runs substantially through National Chapters — country- or region-level groups of signatories that coordinate local action-plan development, share practice, and, where relevant, engage national funders and ministries. CASRAI covers the following chapters and regional reform efforts in depth:
| Country / Region | Guide |
|---|---|
| Ireland | CoARA National Chapter Ireland |
| Spain | CoARA National Chapter Spain |
| Italy | CoARA National Chapter Italy |
| France | CoARA National Chapter France |
| United Kingdom | CoARA National Chapter United Kingdom |
| Norway | CoARA Implementation: Norway and the Research Council |
| Germany | DFG and CoARA: Germany’s Position on Responsible Research Metrics |
| United States | MA3 Challenge: US Research Assessment Reform |
| Asia-Pacific | Asia-Pacific Research Assessment Reform Workshop, Singapore |
| Latin America | FOLEC/CLACSO: Latin America Research Assessment Reform |
| Hong Kong | DORA, CoARA, and Hong Kong’s Move Toward Responsible Assessment |
National chapters vary widely in maturity — some, like the UK and Italy chapters, coordinate dozens of affiliated organisations and run active work programmes; others are earlier-stage. Chapter rosters and activity levels change frequently; each linked guide above notes its own verification date and points to the live coara.org chapter page for the current roster.
Who Can Join, and Who Already Has
CoARA membership is open to institutions, not individuals: universities and university associations, research funders, academies and learned societies, research infrastructures, and national or regional research-assessment authorities. Since the December 2022 launch with 423 founding signatories, the roster has grown to several hundred additional organisations, skewed toward Europe but with a growing base in Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and elsewhere. See CoARA Signatories for eligibility detail and how to check current membership status for a specific institution.
Related Reading
- Research Evaluation Framework — how CoARA-style reform fits into the broader landscape of research evaluation approaches.
- Publishing & Research Assessment — the CASRAI pillar page for the wider cluster this guide sits in, including bibliometrics, peer review, and open-access content.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CoARA the same thing as DORA?
No. DORA is a narrower declaration focused on eliminating misuse of the Journal Impact Factor in evaluating individual researchers, open to both individual and organisational signatories. CoARA is a broader institutional coalition covering the whole research-assessment system — hiring, promotion, funding, and institutional evaluation — and only institutions can sign. Many organisations sign both. See DORA vs CoARA for a full comparison.
Can an individual researcher sign the CoARA Agreement?
No. CoARA membership is institutional only — universities, funders, academies, research infrastructures, and research-assessment authorities can sign; individual researchers and commercial entities cannot.
What does an institution actually have to do after signing?
Produce and publish an action plan describing how it will implement the ten commitments, commit resources to the effort, and report on progress periodically. There is no single fixed universal deadline; pace is set by each organisation’s own reform journey.
Does signing CoARA mean an institution must stop using the Journal Impact Factor entirely?
The Agreement commits signatories to abandoning inappropriate uses of the Journal Impact Factor, Article Influence Score, and h-index as direct proxies for quality in assessing individual researchers — not to banning quantitative indicators altogether. Responsible, contextual use of quantitative indicators alongside qualitative peer judgement is explicitly part of the Agreement’s vision.
How is CoARA governed?
CoARA operates through Coalition-wide structures (a General Assembly of signatories and coordinating bodies) alongside thematic Working Groups and the National Chapters described above, which handle most day-to-day implementation support at the country or region level. For governance specifics, consult coara.org directly, since committee composition and structure are updated periodically.
