Signing DORA or joining CoARA is a statement of intent. Rewriting the actual criteria a promotion and tenure (P&T) committee applies — the rubric, the dossier template, the language reviewers are instructed to weigh — is a separate, much harder step, and most institutions that take it don’t announce it the way they announced the signature. This guide sets aside the frameworks themselves (see our comparison of what DORA and CoARA actually commit signatories to if you need that grounding first) and looks instead at documented cases: institutions that have concretely changed review, promotion, or tenure criteria, and what changed in practice.
The honest starting point is that concrete examples are still the minority, not the norm, among the thousands of DORA and CoARA signatories. A 2024 qualitative study of US faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure practices published in Research Evaluation found that only three large US research-performing institutions — Syracuse University, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Larkin University — had signed DORA as of March 2024, and signing is itself only the first step. This page is deliberately narrow: it covers institutions and programs with a documented, checkable change to P&T-relevant criteria, not aspirational commitments or general reform rhetoric.
Utrecht University: removing the impact factor from hiring and promotion (Netherlands)
Utrecht University signed DORA in 2019 and, through its Recognition and Rewards program, moved to remove journal impact factor from hiring and promotion assessment entirely, with every department applying the revised standards by early 2022. In place of journal-level metrics, departments were instructed to weigh a broader set of criteria — including open science practice, teamwork, leadership, and public engagement — and to require that any quantitative indicators still used be accompanied by a narrative explaining why that indicator is meaningfully related to the work being assessed, rather than cited as a number on its own. The change was reported in Nature and drew public pushback from some researchers concerned about losing a familiar, comparatively fast proxy — a disagreement Times Higher Education covered directly — which is itself useful context: this was a contested internal policy change, not a frictionless adoption.
Ghent University: a five-year narrative evaluation cycle (Belgium)
Ghent University moved away from metrics-led evaluation starting in 2019, replacing it with a review structure built around a personalized evaluation committee and a five-year assessment cycle. Under this model, faculty write narrative self-reflections covering research, teaching, institutional service, and leadership, which a committee uses to guide coaching and development rather than a single up-or-down metrics scorecard. Ghent joined CoARA in 2022 and has published an action plan covering 2023–2027 to extend this approach, according to the university’s own research-evaluation pages and DORA’s published case study on the institution.
Imperial College London: narrative CVs in the research-staff promotion process (United Kingdom)
Imperial College London has built a narrative CV format directly into its research-staff promotion and progression review process, moving away from a metrics-and-publication-list CV toward a structured written account of a researcher’s contributions across categories such as knowledge production, capability building, and community engagement. This mirrors the format UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) developed for its own funding assessments (Résumé for Research and Innovation, R4RI), but Imperial’s version is notable specifically because it is applied at the institutional level, inside an actual promotion process, rather than only at the funder-application stage. See our related coverage of why other funders are adopting narrative-CV formats beyond UKRI for the funder-side context this institutional example sits alongside.
The MA3 Challenge: funding six US institutions to actually rebuild RPT processes
The clearest current US example isn’t a single university’s policy but a funded reform program. The Modernizing Academic Appointment & Advancement (MA3) Challenge, organized by the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA) in partnership with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program, and funded with roughly $1.5 million from the Moore, Dana, Rita Allen, and Robert Wood Johnson foundations, funds a defined cohort of US colleges and universities to implement — not merely declare — changes to hiring, review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) processes.
MA3’s inaugural cohort covers six institutions: Columbia University Climate School, Michigan State University, Philander Smith University, Stanford Medicine, UC Santa Cruz, and the University of Northern Colorado — a deliberately mixed group spanning large research-intensive universities, a medical school, a climate-focused school, a regional public university, and a private HBCU, rather than a single institutional type. According to a DORA guest post on the program published April 2026, the broader call drew more than 200 expressions of interest and roughly 100 full proposals, with about 70% coming from large research-intensive universities and 30% from minority-serving or teaching-focused institutions — a sign of real demand beyond the funded cohort, even though most of that demand hasn’t yet turned into implemented criteria changes. Full detail on the program itself is in our separate coverage of the MA3 Challenge’s move from declaration to implementation.
What these examples have in common
Across Utrecht, Ghent, Imperial College London, and the MA3 cohort, the concrete changes cluster around a small set of recurring mechanisms rather than a single template:
- Dropping journal-level metrics as a standalone criterion — not banning quantitative indicators outright, but requiring that any metric cited be accompanied by a narrative justification (Utrecht is the clearest case of this).
- Narrative CVs or narrative self-reflections replacing, or sitting alongside, a conventional publication-list CV (Imperial College London, Ghent).
- Multi-year evaluation cycles with a committee or coaching structure, rather than an annual or per-application metrics scorecard (Ghent’s five-year cycle is the most developed example).
- Funded, structured implementation support rather than an unfunded policy mandate — MA3 explicitly pays institutions to do the redesign work, on the premise that criteria change is genuine institutional labor, not a document edit.
None of these four institutions treats DORA or CoARA membership itself as the reform — in each case, the framework commitment preceded a separate, internally-led process to actually rewrite committee-facing criteria, and that process took years, not the single review cycle that a policy announcement might suggest.
How uneven implementation still is
It would misrepresent the state of the field to present these four examples as representative. Signatory counts for both frameworks have grown quickly — DORA has been signed by individuals and organizations in over 150 countries, and CoARA’s own membership page reports several hundred member organizations — but a signature commits an institution to work toward reform, not to a specific rewritten rubric on a specific date, and CoARA’s own Agreement leaves the pace and specifics of implementation largely to each signatory’s own action plan. The 2024 Research Evaluation study cited above, along with CoARA’s and DORA’s own published case-study collections (CoARA’s Reformscape catalogue and DORA’s case-study library), function as evidence precisely because they are curated collections of the institutions that have gone public with concrete change — not a representative sample of the full signatory base. For most signatories, what’s publicly documented is the commitment, not yet a rewritten P&T dossier template.
Two practical implications follow. First, an institution’s DORA or CoARA membership alone is not evidence that its P&T criteria have changed — check the institution’s own published criteria or action plan, not just its signatory status. Second, the examples that are documented skew toward institutions with dedicated open-science or research-assessment staff capacity (Utrecht, Ghent) or direct external funding to do the redesign work (MA3) — smaller or less-resourced institutions face the same reform pressure without the same implementation capacity, which is a real, unresolved gap in how evenly this reform is actually landing.
What this means for research administrators
If your institution is considering or is mid-way through this kind of change, the documented examples above suggest a few practical patterns worth planning around: budget years, not months, for a full rewrite of committee-facing criteria and dossier templates; expect internal disagreement about losing familiar, fast proxies like impact factor (Utrecht’s experience is instructive here, not an outlier); and treat the framework signature and the criteria rewrite as two separate project milestones with separate owners, since conflating them is exactly what produces a signed commitment with no operational follow-through. For the underlying frameworks these institutions are responding to, see our DORA and CoARA comparison guide and side-by-side comparison; for the broader lineage connecting DORA, CoARA, and funder-side reform like UKRI’s R4RI, see our coverage of the responsible-assessment lineage.
Frequently asked questions
Has any US university actually changed its tenure criteria because of DORA or CoARA?
Direct institutional examples remain limited in the US relative to Europe. The clearest current US evidence of concrete change is the MA3 Challenge cohort — six institutions funded to implement (not just declare) new hiring, review, promotion, and tenure processes, described above. Broader DORA signatory counts among large US research institutions remain small: a 2024 study identified only three (Syracuse University, Illinois Institute of Technology, Larkin University) as of March 2024.
Does signing CoARA legally require an institution to change its P&T criteria by a set date?
No. CoARA’s Agreement commits signatories to work toward its stated principles and to develop their own action plan, but it does not impose a single fixed deadline or a specific rewritten rubric that applies uniformly across all members — implementation pace and specifics are set by each institution.
What is a narrative CV, and is it the same thing as a DORA-compliant CV?
A narrative CV is a structured, written-contribution format (used by UKRI’s R4RI, and institutionally by Imperial College London and, in a related form, Ghent University) that replaces or supplements a conventional publication-list CV. DORA does not mandate any single CV format; narrative CVs are one mechanism institutions and funders have adopted that is consistent with DORA’s broader principle of not relying on journal-level metrics as a proxy for quality.
Where can I find more documented institutional examples beyond the ones on this page?
CoARA maintains a Reformscape catalogue of institutions implementing responsible research assessment, and DORA publishes its own case-study collection at sfdora.org — both are curated, growing collections rather than a comprehensive registry, so absence from either doesn’t mean an institution hasn’t changed anything, only that it hasn’t been documented there.
