Most research-assessment reform activity that CASRAI has tracked to date runs through two international vehicles: DORA, a signatory declaration against journal-impact-factor-based evaluation, and CoARA, a European-anchored coalition built around a shared reform agreement and national/regional chapters. The Modernizing Academic Appointment & Advancement (MA3) Challenge is a distinct, US-specific initiative that sits alongside those two rather than replacing either: instead of asking institutions to sign a statement of principle, it funds a defined cohort of US universities to actually rebuild their hiring, review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) processes, and requires them to show their work.
What MA3 is, and who runs it
MA3 is organized by the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA), in partnership with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Aspen Institute’s Science & Society Program. It is funded by roughly $1.5 million in combined support from four foundations: the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Dana Foundation, the Rita Allen Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The Challenge is open to US-based accredited, tax-exempt colleges and universities, including individual departments, centers, and institutes applying below the full-institution level. Awardees receive multi-year funding to implement, not just study, changes to RPT criteria and process, and join a facilitated community of practice, coordinated by ORCA, where cohort members exchange implementation experience.
Why it is framed as distinct from DORA and CoARA
DORA and CoARA are both, at core, agreement-based reform vehicles: an institution signs on to a set of principles (DORA) or a shared commitment framework with self-reported progress (CoARA), and implementation detail and pace are left largely to the signatory. That model has produced broad reach — thousands of DORA signatories and a large CoARA membership, heavily European — but limited visibility into what changed operationally inside any given RPT process.
MA3 is narrower and more prescriptive by design. It funds a small, defined cohort rather than an open-ended signatory list, ties funding to a concrete implementation plan for hiring, review, promotion, and tenure practices specifically, and is explicitly framed by its organizers as moving reform “beyond diagnosis and discussion and into concrete implementation of new assessment systems.” It is also unambiguously a US initiative, addressing a gap that both CASRAI and DORA itself have flagged: US uptake of assessment reform has historically lagged Europe’s CoARA-driven momentum, and tenure and promotion in the US runs through department- and institution-specific processes with far less central coordination than most European systems.
Current status and the inaugural cohort
Interest in the first funding round was substantial relative to the size of the award pool: organizers reported more than 200 expressions of interest, close to 100 full proposals, and 300+ participants across information sessions, with roughly 70% of submissions coming from large research-intensive universities and about 30% from Minority Serving Institutions and teaching-focused institutions.
Six institutions make up the inaugural MA3 cohort, each pursuing a different angle on RPT reform:
- Columbia University Climate School — revising faculty review to credit interdisciplinary climate scholarship, community partnerships, policy engagement, and public communication.
- Michigan State University — integrating publicly impactful scholarship and entrepreneurship into promotion and tenure criteria university-wide.
- Philander Smith University — embedding transparent, open-science research practices into career advancement and annual review.
- Stanford Medicine — recognizing and rewarding “evidence-to-action” research that translates findings into policy and practice.
- University of California, Santa Cruz — developing guidelines for evaluating open science, open-source software, science communication, and graduate mentoring in merit and promotion decisions.
- University of Northern Colorado — revising evaluation criteria to recognize interdisciplinary collaboration, open educational resources, community engagement, and student-centered teaching.
Awardees operate on a roughly two-year implementation cycle, with ORCA coordinating a community of practice intended to surface transferable lessons for institutions beyond the funded cohort.
What this means for research administrators
For US research offices and faculty affairs units, MA3 is worth tracking less as a program to apply to directly (the current cohort is fixed) and more as a source of tested RPT-reform language and criteria that other institutions can adapt without funding of their own. Because MA3 requires implementation rather than a signed statement, its outputs — revised dossier guidelines, criteria language for crediting open-science practices or public engagement, department-level committee charges — are likely to be more directly reusable than high-level declaration text. Institutions already engaged with DORA or CoARA can treat MA3 as a practical implementation reference point rather than a competing commitment: the three are compatible, not mutually exclusive, and an institution can be a DORA signatory, track CoARA’s agreement framework, and still draw on MA3 cohort materials when it actually rewrites its RPT policy.
CASRAI’s DORA and CoARA comparison guide and DORA vs CoARA comparison cover the declaration/agreement side of assessment reform in more depth; this post will be updated as later MA3 cohorts and any published implementation guidance become available.
