The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is closing out a three-year strategic plan that has shaped how universities, funders and publishers approach dora research assessment since 2023. As the cycle concludes in 2026, institutional leaders — many already drafting roadmaps for the UK’s REF 2029 cycle — are asking a pointed question: did the plan change how research is actually evaluated, or did it mostly formalise commitments that were never operationalised?
The stakes are not abstract. Hiring, promotion and tenure committees, grant panels and REF sub-panels all rely on criteria that DORA has argued for over a decade are distorted by proxy metrics such as the journal impact factor. As the strategic plan closes, the answer matters for every research office deciding whether reform commitments become working policy or remain a signature on a webpage.
This article takes stock of what the 2023-2026 plan aimed to achieve, where UK institutions stand relative to global peers, and what research administrators should prioritise as DORA and adjacent initiatives such as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) move into their next phase.
What Is DORA Research Assessment, and Why Did It Need a Strategic Plan?
For research offices still asking what DORA research assessment means in practice, the answer starts with a single recommendation: stop using journal-level metrics — above all the journal impact factor — as a proxy for the quality of an individual researcher’s work or an individual article. DORA originated in 2012 and has since grown from a single declaration into a sector-wide movement spanning universities, funders, publishers and learned societies. Its recommendations ask institutions to judge research on its own merits, considering the full range of scholarly outputs — datasets, software, preprints and contributions that fall outside traditional authorship — rather than defaulting to where a paper was published.
Signing the declaration was always the easy part. Translating a set of general recommendations into workable hiring, promotion and tenure (HPT) criteria, grant assessment rubrics and departmental review processes is a slow, resource-intensive institutional change project — precisely the gap the 2023-2026 strategic plan was designed to close. Rather than continuing to prioritise signatory growth alone, the plan shifted DORA’s emphasis toward implementation support: practical HPT guidance, regional and language-specific outreach, and case studies intended to help signatories move from a values statement to an operating policy.
Three Years of Reform: What the Plan Set Out to Do
Across the plan period, DORA’s public-facing work concentrated on a small number of practical levers rather than advocacy alone:
- Implementation tools over pledges. Resources such as hiring, promotion and tenure guidance were positioned as the primary deliverable for signatories, shifting the conversation from “have you signed?” to “what has changed in your criteria documents?”
- Recognition of institutional reformers. DORA has used award and case-study mechanisms to surface institutions that rewrote review criteria, giving other research offices templates to adapt rather than starting from a blank page.
- Alignment with parallel coalitions. DORA’s messaging increasingly converged with CoARA, the European-led coalition committing signatories to move away from inappropriate use of journal- and publisher-based metrics in research assessment, reducing duplicated effort for institutions that had signed both.
- Sector-specific outreach. Funders, publishers and academic societies were treated as distinct audiences, reflecting the reality that a funder’s assessment reform (grant panel criteria) looks nothing like a university’s (promotion criteria).
The honest assessment, three years on, is uneven progress. Awareness of responsible research assessment as a concept is now mainstream in research administration circles — it features regularly at EARMA, ARMA, NCURA and INORMS conferences and working groups. But the distance between a signed declaration and a rewritten promotion criteria document remains, in most institutions, unclosed. Many committees still ask candidates for journal names and citation counts in practice, even where formal policy documents have been updated to discourage it.
The UK Picture: DORA Signatories and the REF 2029 Shadow
The UK has one of the highest concentrations of DORA signatories in the world, a legacy of the sector-wide reckoning triggered by the Metric Tide report and reinforced by the REF 2021 panel criteria, which explicitly discouraged the use of journal impact factors and similar metrics in the assessment of research outputs. Major funders — including UKRI — sit among UK DORA signatories, alongside a large number of universities and learned societies, which gives the UK an unusually joined-up signatory base compared with many peer countries.
That density creates both an advantage and a risk as REF 2029 preparations get underway. The advantage is that UK institutions do not need to relitigate the case for reform — funders and REF panels have already stated the principle. The risk is complacency: because so many UK organisations already appear on the DORA signatories UK list, there is a temptation to treat the declaration as a compliance checkbox rather than a live obligation to keep auditing hiring, promotion and tenure practices as REF 2029 criteria are finalised. Institutions that treated their DORA signature as a one-off communications exercise in 2013 or 2018 are now the ones scrambling to demonstrate genuine reform as REF 2029 assessment frameworks take shape.
Where Responsible Research Assessment Still Falls Short
Two pressures are complicating the responsible research assessment agenda as DORA’s plan concludes. First, generative AI is reshaping both research production and research misconduct risk — organisations including COPE and Retraction Watch have documented a growing caseload of AI-related integrity concerns, from fabricated citations to undisclosed AI-generated text, which assessment reform efforts were not originally designed to address. Second, the metrics DORA sought to displace have not disappeared; they have migrated into AI-generated research summaries, university rankings and funder dashboards that quietly reintroduce citation-based proxies under new interfaces.
There is also a persistent recognition gap: contribution to a paper is still frequently reduced to authorship order, even though structured contribution taxonomies exist to describe roles more precisely. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Wider adoption of structured contribution statements — alongside persistent identifiers such as ORCID iDs and ROR organisation identifiers, and metadata standards maintained by DataCite and CrossRef — gives assessment committees a genuine alternative to inferring contribution from author-list position. DORA’s own recommendations point in this direction, but uptake in HPT panels remains inconsistent.
What This Means for Research Administrators
For institutional leaders assessing their own reform roadmaps as DORA’s plan concludes, three actions stand out:
- Audit, don’t assume. Confirm whether HPT criteria documents have actually been rewritten since your institution signed DORA — a signature date is not evidence of implementation.
- Build REF 2029 criteria around structured contribution data. Require ORCID iDs, ROR affiliations and CRediT-style contribution statements in internal reporting systems now, so REF 2029 narrative CVs and case studies are drafted from clean data rather than reconstructed after the fact.
- Treat CoALition-adjacent commitments as one workstream, not several. Institutions signed up to DORA, CoARA, and cOAlition S-aligned open access policies should map these into a single responsible-assessment policy rather than managing three parallel compliance exercises with overlapping asks.
Conclusion: A Plan Ends, the Work Continues
DORA’s 2023-2026 strategic plan will close having shifted the sector’s vocabulary — responsible research assessment is now a standard term in research administration — without yet closing the gap between policy and practice at most signatory institutions. The organisations best positioned for whatever DORA and CoARA announce next are those that used this plan cycle to rewrite HPT criteria and adopt structured contribution and identifier data, rather than those that simply renewed their signatory status. As REF 2029 preparations intensify across the UK, that distinction will separate institutions that can demonstrate reform from those that can only cite a declaration.
