The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has published A Practical Guide to Implementing Responsible Research Assessment at Research Funding Organizations, a resource aimed squarely at an audience most existing responsible-assessment guidance has treated as secondary: funders themselves, rather than the universities and researchers they fund. DORA marked the release with three regional online launch events on 13-14 May 2026, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the original 2013 declaration.
What the Guide Covers
The Guide was co-developed by DORA with the Global Research Council’s Responsible Research Assessment Working Group (GRC RRA WG) and Science Europe — the two bodies that between them represent most of the world’s national research-funding agencies. That co-authorship is the point: rather than a general statement of principles, the Guide is built as a “one-stop-shop” of practical activities, informational briefs, and quick-reference material that a funding agency can apply at each stage of its own grant lifecycle — from how a call for proposals is framed, through how review panels are instructed to weigh outputs, to how funded projects are monitored and reported on afterward.
It explicitly targets a broader set of roles than most reform literature does: funding-agency leadership, policy leads, program managers, and grant administrators, not only the research-assessment specialists who typically read DORA’s output. It also incorporates case studies drawn from GRC member agencies, and it is deliberately structured to be modular — acknowledging, in its own framing, that public and private funders differ enormously in size, scientific scope, and national context, and that a single fixed template for “responsible assessment” will not fit all of them.
Why a Funder-Specific Guide, Distinct from Institutional Reform
Most of the practical momentum behind DORA and the related Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) commitments has, to date, been documented at the institutional level — universities rewriting promotion and tenure criteria, or hiring committees replacing journal-level metrics with narrative CVs (see CASRAI’s coverage of how institutions are actually rewriting P&T criteria). Funders sit upstream of that: a funding agency’s own call design, review-panel instructions, and reporting requirements shape the incentives researchers and institutions respond to before promotion committees ever see a file. A funder that still asks reviewers to weigh journal impact factor, or that still requires a full bibliometric CV in grant applications, effectively cancels out reform happening at the institutional level.
Some individual funders had already published their own responsible-assessment frameworks before this Guide existed — UK Research and Innovation’s Resume for Research and Innovation (R4RI) is a widely cited example. What the new Guide adds is a cross-agency, co-developed reference point built specifically for funders as a category, rather than a single agency’s bespoke approach — with the Global Research Council and Science Europe’s involvement giving it reach across a large share of the world’s national and disciplinary funding bodies.
The Launch Events
DORA held three regional virtual panel sessions to introduce the Guide, co-hosted with the Global Research Council and Science Europe:
- Americas — Wednesday, 13 May 2026, 14:00 EDT, with panelists including Ana Denicola (Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay), Emily Ford (Open Research Funders Group), and Olival Freire Jr. (CNPq, Brazil).
- Asia-Pacific — Thursday, 14 May 2026, 14:00 AEST, with panelists Lee Harris (Australian Research Council) and Mark Stagg (Royal Society Te Aparangi).
- Africa & Europe — Thursday, 14 May 2026, 12:00 BST, with panelists Nosisa Dube (National Research Foundation, South Africa), Annalisa Montesanti (Health Research Board, Ireland), and Karen Skytte Larsen (Villum Foundation, Denmark).
The panelist lineup itself signals the intended reach: national funding agencies, foundation-side funders, and cross-funder advocacy groups from every world region were represented on the same set of panels, rather than the launch being framed around one country’s funding system.
What This Means for Research Administrators
For research offices and grants administrators, the practical relevance is less about signing anything — the Guide is not a declaration with a signatory list, unlike DORA itself or CoARA’s Agreement — and more about anticipating how funder-side requirements may shift over the coming grant cycles. Program managers and grant administrators are explicitly named as part of the Guide’s intended audience, which suggests funders adopting its recommendations may change wording in calls for proposals, review-panel guidance, or post-award reporting templates rather than introducing an entirely separate compliance process. Institutions that have already done DORA/CoARA-aligned work on their own review and promotion criteria are likely to find funder-side changes easier to absorb, since the same underlying shift — away from journal-level metrics and toward assessing the substance of research and its outputs — is what both sets of reforms are converging on.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the exact title of the new DORA Guide?
A Practical Guide to Implementing Responsible Research Assessment at Research Funding Organizations. It was co-developed by DORA, the Global Research Council’s Responsible Research Assessment Working Group, and Science Europe.
How is this different from DORA’s original declaration or from CoARA?
DORA’s 2013 declaration and CoARA’s 2022 Agreement are both commitment documents that institutions, funders, and other organizations sign or join. This Guide is not a declaration to sign — it is implementation guidance: practical activities, briefs, and case studies for funders that have already committed (or are considering committing) to responsible research assessment, addressing how to actually change call design, review, and monitoring practice.
Who is the Guide written for?
Research funding organizations specifically — named roles include funding-agency leadership, policy leads, program managers, and grant administrators, spanning public and private, national and disciplinary funders of varying size.
Does this replace funder-specific frameworks like UKRI’s R4RI?
No. Individual funder frameworks such as UKRI’s Resume for Research and Innovation continue to operate independently; the DORA Guide is a cross-agency reference point that funders can draw on alongside, or in building, their own frameworks, rather than a replacement for them.
CASRAI will monitor for public commentary or uptake data following the May 2026 launch and update this coverage accordingly.
