On June 2, 2026, DORA, FORCE11, CoARA and ALLEA co-hosted an invite-only, full-day workshop titled “Shared Principles, Regional Realities: Advancing Research Assessment Reform in the Asia-Pacific” at Singapore Management University (SMU), co-located with the FORCE2026 conference. Over 30 researchers, publishers, funders and policymakers attended — the first workshop of its kind to bring the four organizations together specifically around Asia-Pacific implementation of responsible research assessment (RRA), rather than around a European or North American reform agenda.
The distinction matters for research administrators tracking reform globally: most of the visible RRA infrastructure to date — the CoARA Agreement itself, national CoARA chapters, and the bulk of DORA signatory activity — has been built around European institutional contexts. This workshop was explicitly framed around where that model does and doesn’t transfer to Asia-Pacific systems, which is a genuinely different question from “how many signatories does the region have.”
Who organized it, and why these four bodies
DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), FORCE11, CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) and ALLEA (All European Academies) jointly organized the session, with ALLEA coordinating on CoARA’s behalf. Pairing a metrics-focused declaration (DORA), a scholarly-communications research community (FORCE11), a European multi-stakeholder coalition (CoARA) and a federation of European academies (ALLEA) around a single regional workshop reflects a deliberate attempt to avoid presenting RRA as a single, exportable European template — a concern raised directly in the discussion (see below).
What the workshop covered
Sessions and interactive breakout groups addressed five recurring themes in current RRA discourse, applied specifically to Asia-Pacific conditions:
- Global alignment vs. regional customization — whether a shared set of RRA principles can accommodate genuinely different national funding, hiring and promotion systems without becoming either too vague to act on or too prescriptive to adopt.
- Responsible use of quantitative indicators — not eliminating metrics outright, but building guardrails around how citation counts, journal impact factors and rankings are used in hiring, promotion and funding decisions.
- University rankings and research excellence — decoupling institutional ranking pressure from what reform advocates consider genuine research quality.
- Generative AI and authorship accountability — how assessment frameworks should treat AI-assisted outputs and who remains accountable for them.
- Incentivizing open science — recognizing open data, software and other non-publication outputs within formal evaluation criteria, a theme that connects directly to CoARA signatory commitments elsewhere.
Regional examples presented
What differentiates this workshop from CASRAI’s existing coverage of European CoARA national chapters is the specific set of Asia-Pacific institutional examples put on record:
- Australia — Queensland University of Technology (QUT) described work to track diversity in both research outputs and research personnel, going beyond traditional publication-based metrics.
- New Zealand — the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) presented its use of narrative CVs to better assess Indigenous researchers, aligned with the Vision Mātauranga policy framework for Māori-centred research and innovation.
- Japan — Kyoto University presented its COMON framework, describing a shift from metric-based, top-down control toward narrative-based, dialogue-focused assessment at the research-unit level.
- India — participants described continuing pressure on researchers from university rankings and journal impact factors, and discussed the difficulty of creating institutional space for more “holistic” representations of research contribution under those incentive structures.
None of these four examples appear in CASRAI’s existing CoARA/DORA coverage, which to date has focused on European national chapters, the United States (the MA3 Challenge), Latin America (FOLEC-CLACSO) and South Korea’s NRF metrics debate — making this workshop a genuine, previously uncovered regional data point rather than a restatement of prior reporting.
What was said about avoiding a one-size-fits-all model
Several participants spoke directly to the risk of RRA reform simply exporting a Western or European template into Asia-Pacific systems. Cameron Neylon, speaking for CoARA, framed the goal of reform as delivering better outcomes for society within each institution’s own organizational context, rather than uniform compliance with a fixed external standard. Bianca Kramer, representing the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, argued that collective action across regions is necessary specifically to avoid imposing a Western perspective on assessment reform. Daniela Perrotta, representing FOLEC-CLACSO — the Latin American forum CASRAI has covered separately — underscored the need for regional actors to shape assessment systems that work on their own terms rather than adopt an imported model wholesale.
Outcome: a live link to the CoARA Regional Forum in Budapest
The Singapore workshop closed with a live cross-regional connection to the concurrent CoARA Regional Forum taking place in Budapest — a deliberate signal that Asia-Pacific and European reform conversations are meant to inform each other rather than run in parallel. No formal joint declaration or new institutional commitment was announced at the close of the workshop; organizers described the session’s outcome as strengthened regional networks and a foundation for further collaboration on assessment reform, open scholarship and research-infrastructure development across Asia-Pacific, rather than a concrete deliverable.
Why this matters for research administrators
For institutions in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India, and elsewhere in Asia-Pacific evaluating whether to align with CoARA or DORA, this workshop is useful less as an announcement and more as a source of regionally grounded implementation detail: narrative-CV approaches tied to Indigenous-research policy (New Zealand), unit-level narrative frameworks replacing metric control (Japan), and explicit institutional pushback against rankings-driven incentives (India) are all closer to reusable models than anything in the CoARA Agreement text itself. Administrators working on promotion-and-tenure criteria or funder compliance frameworks in the region may find these examples a more direct starting point than the general commitments covered in CASRAI’s DORA and CoARA comparison guide or its guide to how institutions are rewriting P&T criteria.
Related CASRAI coverage
- DORA vs CoARA: comparing the two frameworks
- DORA and CoARA: Comparing Research Assessment Reform Commitments
- DORA and CoARA in Practice: How Institutions Are Actually Rewriting P&T Criteria
- FOLEC-CLACSO: Latin America’s Regional Forum for Research-Assessment Reform
- MA3 Challenge: US research-assessment reform moves from declaration to implementation
- South Korea Rethinks Its Research Metrics
- OECD’s 2026 Report “Reforming Research Assessment for Better Science”: What It Found
- CoARA Signatories
- DORA signatory
Sources: DORA, “Shared Principles, Regional Realities: Recap of the Asia-Pacific event” (June 24, 2026); ALLEA, Event Report: Shared Principles, Regional Realities.
