FOLEC — the Foro Latinoamericano sobre Evaluación Científica (Latin American Forum on Research Assessment) — is a regional initiative of the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), the Latin American Council of Social Sciences. It exists to debate, diagnose, and reform how research is evaluated across Latin America, from a distinctly regional and social-relevance-oriented standpoint. For research administrators tracking the global shift away from metrics-driven assessment — alongside the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) — FOLEC is the closest equivalent in Latin America, but it is not a chapter of either of those bodies. It is an independently organized regional forum with its own origin, governance, and framing.
What is FOLEC-CLACSO?
FOLEC operates as CLACSO’s standing forum on research assessment: a space that convenes universities, national science and technology councils, funders, and researchers from across the region to examine how evaluation systems shape academic careers, institutional incentives, and the kind of research that gets produced. CLACSO itself is a long-standing network of social-science research and higher-education institutions across Latin America and the Caribbean, and FOLEC is one of its thematic programmatic lines rather than a separate legal entity.
Unlike a metrics standard or a signatory declaration, FOLEC’s primary outputs are diagnostic reports, principles documents, and convening events (seminars and conferences) rather than a single agreement institutions formally sign, though its 2024 Declaration of Principles and Proposals (below) functions similarly to a commitment document.
Origins and timeline
- November 2019, Mexico City — FOLEC formally launched with the First Latin American Seminar on Research Assessment, co-organized by CLACSO and Mexico’s National Council for Science and Technology (Conacyt, now Conahcyt).
- 2021 — A second forum was held in coordination with Argentina’s CONICET, held during the CILAC (Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación para América Latina y el Caribe) 2020–2021 process.
- June 2024, UNAM (Mexico) — A Third International Seminar took place during CLACSO’s 9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities.
This places FOLEC’s launch several years before CoARA’s 2022 founding, though after DORA (2012) — it emerged from an already-active regional conversation about the limits of journal-metric-driven evaluation, one closely tied to Latin America’s long-running commitment to non-commercial, diamond open-access publishing infrastructure (SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex).
Core outputs
FOLEC’s published work centers on three main documents:
- A diagnostic report (2020) surveying the state of research-assessment policy and practice across Latin American countries.
- A proposals document setting out recommended directions for reform, aimed at national science and technology organizations and universities.
- A Declaration of Principles and Proposals (2024), approved by CLACSO’s General Assembly, which articulates a case for evaluation reform grounded in social relevance rather than journal-metric proxies.
Beyond publications, FOLEC works directly with national science and technology organizations and universities across the region to advance monitoring and improvement of academic evaluation systems, and has been recognized by the Global Research Council as one of a small number of international mobilizers of responsible research assessment. FOLEC representatives have also participated in working groups convened by UNESCO, the InterAcademy Partnership, and the Global Young Academy, and CLACSO/FOLEC reports collaboration with dozens of partner institutions across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe.
How FOLEC relates to DORA and CoARA
FOLEC is best understood as a parallel, regionally rooted reform effort rather than a subsidiary or affiliate of either global initiative:
- DORA: FOLEC has held a seat on DORA‘s Executive Board since January 2022, giving it a direct, ongoing institutional link to the reform movement DORA anchors. This is a governance relationship, not an equivalence — FOLEC is not itself a DORA signatory list or scoring mechanism.
- CoARA: CoARA organizes its regional presence through National Chapters — country-specific groups of CoARA Agreement signatories that coordinate implementation within a given country (CASRAI covers several of these individually). As of CoARA’s own published chapter listings, its National Chapters are concentrated in Europe, with no equivalent CoARA Latin America regional chapter. FOLEC sits outside that structure entirely: it predates CoARA’s 2022 founding, was not created under CoARA’s framework, and institutions do not “join” FOLEC the way they sign the CoARA Agreement. For a side-by-side look at how DORA and CoARA themselves differ as commitment frameworks, see CASRAI’s DORA vs CoARA comparison and the guide on how DORA and CoARA commitments compare in practice.
In short: DORA, CoARA, and FOLEC are three distinct organizations sharing a common reform lineage and overlapping goals, but with different origins, governance, and geographic scope. CASRAI’s broader look at that shared lineage — including the Hong Kong Principles — is covered in DORA, CoARA, and the Hong Kong Principles: the responsible-assessment lineage.
The regional and Global South framing
What distinguishes FOLEC’s framing from DORA’s or CoARA’s is not just geography but emphasis. FOLEC’s stated positioning consistently foregrounds a few themes that are less central in the European/North American reform conversation:
- Social relevance as an explicit evaluation criterion — assessing research partly by its contribution to regional social, economic, and public problems, not only by scholarly citation.
- Democratizing science — treating evaluation reform as connected to who gets to participate in producing and validating knowledge, not solely a technical metrics question.
- Continuity with existing regional open-access infrastructure — FOLEC’s positioning builds on Latin America’s decades-old, largely non-commercial, diamond open-access publishing tradition (SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex, and newer coordination platforms like AmeliCA), treating open, publicly-funded infrastructure as inseparable from evaluation reform rather than a separate open-access policy question. CASRAI covers this infrastructure in the AmeliCA and Plataforma S dictionary entries, and in Diamond OA at the inflection: SciELO + Latindex + AmeliCA.
For a research administrator working with Latin American partner institutions, this framing matters practically: an institution engaging with FOLEC’s principles may weight social/regional relevance and non-commercial publishing venues differently in tenure and funding criteria than an institution primarily aligned to DORA or a European CoARA National Chapter — even where the underlying critique of journal impact factor and citation-count-driven evaluation is shared across all three.
Frequently asked questions
Is FOLEC a CoARA National Chapter for Latin America?
No. CoARA’s National Chapters are a specific governance structure for coordinating CoARA Agreement signatories within a country, and are concentrated in Europe; there is no CoARA National Chapter for Latin America. FOLEC is an independently governed CLACSO program that predates CoARA and was not created within CoARA’s chapter framework.
Does an institution “sign” FOLEC the way it signs DORA or the CoARA Agreement?
Not in the same formal, listed-signatory sense. FOLEC’s core outputs are diagnostic and principles documents and a 2024 Declaration approved by CLACSO’s own General Assembly; institutional engagement tends to happen through participation in FOLEC seminars, national science and technology organizations, and CLACSO’s broader membership network rather than through a public FOLEC-specific signatory registry.
What is CLACSO’s relationship to FOLEC?
CLACSO (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales) is the parent organization; FOLEC is CLACSO’s thematic forum on research assessment, not a separate legal entity. CLACSO is a long-established network of social-science research and higher-education institutions across Latin America and the Caribbean.
How does FOLEC connect to DORA?
FOLEC has held a seat on DORA’s Executive Board since January 2022, giving the two organizations a direct governance link, though FOLEC remains an independently governed regional forum rather than a regional arm of DORA.
