CoARA Implementation in Norway: The Research Council of Norway and NOR-CAM

Norway is one of the more frequently cited national examples of responsible-research-assessment reform in practice, but the details are easy to blur together: DORA, CoARA, and a Norway-specific tool called NOR-CAM are three distinct commitments that overlap in time and in the institutions involved. This page separates what the Research Council of Norway (Forskningsrådet) has actually committed to and changed in its own processes from what is happening more broadly across Norwegian universities under national coordination, and flags where public documentation is thin so readers don’t mistake aspiration for verified practice.

Three overlapping commitments, not one

Norway’s responsible-assessment landscape rests on three separate agreements that get conflated in casual references to “CoARA in Norway”:

• DORA (the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the Research Council of Norway signed DORA in 2018, well before CoARA existed. See DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment).
• CoARA (the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) — launched in December 2022; the Research Council of Norway is listed among CoARA’s signatory organisations, alongside Norwegian universities and research funders. See CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) and CoARA Agreement.
• NOR-CAM (the Norwegian Career Assessment Matrix) — a national tool developed by Universities Norway (Universitets- og høgskolerådet, UHR), not by the Research Council, though the Research Council participated in the working group that built it.

For the general distinction between DORA and CoARA as frameworks, see DORA and CoARA: Comparing Research Assessment Reform Commitments and DORA vs CoARA — responsible-assessment frameworks. For how institutions elsewhere have translated these commitments into promotion criteria, see DORA and CoARA in Practice: How Institutions Are Actually Rewriting P&T Criteria. This page focuses specifically on the Norwegian national picture.

What the Research Council of Norway has committed to (verified)

The Research Council of Norway’s own published DORA-support statement sets out concrete changes to how it evaluates funding applications, not just a general endorsement. According to the Council’s own site, since signing DORA in 2018 it has built the following into its assessment practice:

• Journal Impact Factor is excluded from funding decisions. The Council states explicitly that Journal Impact Factor should not be used in assessing applications.
• Track record is de-emphasised relative to project quality. The CV and track record of the project manager and project team are treated as only part of the assessment, not the most important element.
• A capped, self-selected publication list replaces exhaustive output counts. Expert panels are directed to look at the list of (around) ten publications that applicants themselves identify as most relevant, rather than rewarding sheer publication volume.
• CV templates were widened beyond traditional publications. Application templates were customised to allow researchers to list datasets, software, and other community-impact activities alongside articles.

These are the Research Council’s own stated commitments as an evaluator and funder — they describe how the Council assesses grant applications, which is a narrower and more concrete claim than a general statement of support for reform. Readers should treat this list as what is publicly documented on the Council’s own site rather than assume it covers every internal evaluation process; the Council has not published a comprehensive, itemised audit of every criterion changed since 2018.

NOR-CAM: the national tool, developed by Universities Norway

NOR-CAM (Norwegian Career Assessment Matrix) is the concrete artefact most often pointed to when people describe “Norway’s CoARA implementation.” It’s important to be precise about its origin: NOR-CAM was developed by Universities Norway (UHR), the cooperative body for Norwegian higher-education institutions, with development work starting around 2019 and the matrix published in 2020–2021 — before CoARA’s December 2022 launch. The Research Council of Norway participated in the working group that produced it but is not its author.

NOR-CAM assesses academic competence across six areas:

1. Research outputs
2. Research process
3. Pedagogical (teaching) competence
4. Impact and innovation
5. Leadership
6. Other experience

Rather than a single numeric score, NOR-CAM uses a documentation matrix with a reflective, narrative-CV-style column alongside each competence area — structurally similar in spirit to the narrative-CV approaches CoARA’s own commitments encourage, though NOR-CAM predates and was built independently of the CoARA agreement text.

Institutional adoption: real but uneven, and still in progress

Most Norwegian higher-education institutions have taken up some version of NOR-CAM, but ‘most institutions have engaged with it’ is a different claim from ‘every institution has replaced its formal promotion criteria with it,’ and the two get blurred in secondary coverage. What’s verifiable:

• Universities Norway (UHR) coordinates a CoARA National Chapter for Norway, whose stated purpose is explicitly twofold: to share experience on institutional versions of NOR-CAM, and to provide a forum for discussing the European Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (the CoARA/ARRA agreement text) in the Norwegian context. That framing itself signals that NOR-CAM adoption and formal CoARA-agreement implementation are being run as related but distinct workstreams inside Norway, not a single finished reform.
• Individual institutions are customising NOR-CAM rather than adopting one national template unmodified — for example, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) has documented its own NOR-CAM implementation process, run jointly between HR and research administration, reporting positive early feedback particularly from early-career researchers. The University of South-Eastern Norway has separately published its own CoARA action plan.
• Publicly available material describes institutions as ‘implementing or preparing to implement’ their own NOR-CAM versions — language that indicates active, ongoing rollout rather than a completed national standard as of this writing.

Where sourcing is genuinely thin: there is no comprehensive, institution-by-institution public audit of which specific hiring, tenure, or promotion criteria have actually been rewritten as a direct result of NOR-CAM or the CoARA agreement, versus which institutions have adopted the language of reform without yet changing formal criteria documents. Treat institution-level claims of ‘full implementation’ with the same caution CASRAI recommends for any CoARA signatory’s self-reported progress — see CoARA Signatories for the general point that signing the agreement commits an organisation to a self-paced reform trajectory, not an immediate, uniform, verifiable set of new practices.

How Norway’s approach compares to other national implementations

A few structural features distinguish the Norwegian case from how other countries have approached the same set of commitments:

• A funder-plus-sector-body split. Norway’s national tool (NOR-CAM) was built by the higher-education sector’s own coordinating body (Universities Norway), not by the national research funder. The Research Council of Norway’s role is as a CoARA/DORA signatory in its own right and as a participant in the NOR-CAM working group, but the assessment matrix itself is a university-sector artefact. Countries where the funder plays a more central drafting role in the assessment-reform tool produce a different governance dynamic than Norway’s sector-led model.
• NOR-CAM predates CoARA. Because development started around 2019, NOR-CAM was not built as a CoARA-compliance instrument — it was an independent Norwegian reform that CoARA’s later, broader European agreement subsequently aligned with. This ordering matters for readers trying to judge causality: CoARA did not initiate NOR-CAM, and framing NOR-CAM purely as “Norway’s CoARA implementation” understates its separate origin and elides the DORA commitments (2018) that also predate it.
• A dedicated national coordination body. The CoARA National Chapter structure Norway uses — explicitly splitting NOR-CAM practice-sharing from CoARA/ARRA agreement discussion — is one instance of the National Chapters mechanism CoARA runs generally; other signatory countries organise national coordination differently (through funders, ministries, or rectors’ conferences instead of a HE-sector coordinating body). CASRAI has not yet published a page benchmarking specific national implementations against one another in structured detail; where this guide references a comparable national case, that reflects general knowledge of CoARA’s national-chapter mechanism rather than a completed CASRAI comparison.

What this means for research administrators outside Norway

Norway’s case is a useful illustration of a broader pattern worth generalising, rather than a template to copy directly: a national funder’s own DORA/CoARA commitments (what it will and won’t consider when assessing grant applications) are a genuinely separate question from a sector-wide career-assessment framework built by universities collectively. An institution evaluating its own responsible-assessment reform can usefully ask the same two questions Norway’s structure implicitly separates: what does our funder actually exclude from evaluation criteria (impact factor, output count, etc.), and separately, what documentation framework do we use internally for hiring and promotion decisions? Conflating the two, as informal coverage of “Norway’s CoARA implementation” sometimes does, obscures which commitments are funder-side and which are institution-side — a distinction that matters for anyone trying to replicate the approach.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Research Council of Norway a CoARA signatory?

Yes — the Research Council of Norway appears among CoARA’s listed signatory organisations. It had already signed DORA separately in 2018, several years before CoARA launched in December 2022.

What is NOR-CAM and who created it?

NOR-CAM (Norwegian Career Assessment Matrix) is a national academic career-assessment framework covering research outputs, research process, teaching, impact/innovation, leadership, and other experience. It was developed by Universities Norway (UHR), the coordinating body for Norwegian higher-education institutions, with the Research Council of Norway participating in the working group; development began around 2019 and the matrix was published in 2020–2021, predating CoARA.

Has NOR-CAM replaced Journal Impact Factor and publication counts at Norwegian universities?

Individual institutions are implementing customised versions of NOR-CAM, and several report moving toward broader, narrative-style documentation of academic contribution. The Research Council of Norway itself has stated it does not use Journal Impact Factor in funding decisions. There is no single published national audit confirming that every Norwegian institution has formally removed impact-factor or raw publication-count criteria from its own hiring and promotion policies, so this should be treated as a general direction of travel rather than a completed, uniform national standard.

Is NOR-CAM the same thing as Norway’s CoARA agreement?

No. NOR-CAM is a specific assessment matrix built by Universities Norway, independently of and prior to CoARA. Norway’s CoARA National Chapter treats NOR-CAM practice-sharing and CoARA/ARRA agreement implementation as related but separate workstreams.

Sources

Research Council of Norway, “We support DORA” (forskningsradet.no); CoARA, National Chapters (coara.org); DORA blog, “Norway’s Academic Assessment Reform: NOR-CAM in practice” (sfdora.org, 2025-05-27); University of South-Eastern Norway, CoARA Action Plan (Zenodo record).