CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: CoARA agreement

  • New Expectations and Demands from Science (OECD)

    The OECD’s new working paper, “New expectations and demands from science: Rethinking research assessment frameworks,” maps the tensions, actors, and drivers reshaping how research is judged worldwide. Published as OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers, No. 2026/07, it is a companion to the OECD’s flagship policy brief “Reforming research assessment for better science” — and it does a different job: rather than prescribing solutions, it diagnoses why current assessment systems are misaligned with what science is now expected to deliver.

    New expectations and demands from science is the OECD’s shorthand for a widening gap: funders, governments, and the public increasingly expect research to be open, collaborative, and socially useful, while most assessment frameworks still reward narrow, quantitative output counts. The working paper is a system-level literature review — it identifies who holds power over assessment criteria, what forces are pushing reform, and where the friction actually sits.

    What the OECD’s companion paper actually says

    The working paper is a 43-page system-level overview, not a set of new rules. OECD (2026) states that research assessment frameworks “play a central role in shaping the priorities, direction, and culture of scientific research,” but that they have grown misaligned with “evolving policy priorities, public expectations, and new demands from science.” The core diagnosis is over-reliance on narrow performance measures — publication counts, journal impact factors, and citation metrics — which generates what the paper calls “perverse incentives and undesirable behaviours.”

    Critically, the paper argues these narrow measures systematically undervalue activities that funders and the public now expect: collaboration across disciplines and borders, open science practices, societal engagement, and direct support to policymaking. The paper does not stop at critique — it distils a set of common reform principles from a comparative review of the international literature, intended to help policymakers and institutions design frameworks that better reflect these expectations.

    How it differs from the flagship OECD report

    The two documents were released as a pair but serve distinct purposes, and treating them as interchangeable misses the news value of the working paper. The flagship document — “Reforming research assessment for better science,” OECD Policy Briefs, No. 56 — is the prescriptive, policymaker-facing output: a short brief calling for balanced, cost-effective, transparent assessment approaches “supported by open data and carefully governed use of AI.”

    “New expectations and demands from science” is the underlying evidence base. It is longer, more academic in register, and organised around system mapping rather than recommendations. Where the policy brief tells institutions what to do, the working paper explains why the system is under strain and who the competing actors are — making it the more useful read for anyone designing an institutional assessment policy rather than just citing OECD guidance.

    Assessment dimension Traditional practice (narrow metrics) OECD’s identified shift
    Research outputs recognised Publications, citation counts, journal impact factor Datasets, software, policy contributions, teaching, public engagement
    Data sources Proprietary bibliometric databases Open, interoperable data infrastructure
    Collaboration Individual authorship credit only Team science and cross-sector collaboration valued explicitly
    Societal role Largely absent from formal criteria Societal and policy impact incorporated
    Use of AI in evaluation Ad hoc, ungoverned Carefully governed, transparent use

    Mapping the actors and tensions in research assessment

    The working paper’s distinguishing contribution is its system-level actor map — it names who sets, applies, and is judged by assessment criteria, and where their interests conflict. This is the part a policy brief cannot do in a few pages.

    • Funders and governments, who set the policy priorities that assessment frameworks are meant to serve but often lag them in criteria design.
    • Universities and research institutions, which apply assessment for hiring, promotion, and tenure and are often the slowest layer to change.
    • Publishers and indexing services, whose proprietary metrics (as flagged in expert commentary on the paper, including from bibliometrics researcher Ludo Waltman of Leiden University’s CWTS) still dominate despite the OECD’s call to shift toward open alternatives.
    • Individual researchers, whose career incentives are shaped by all of the above and who bear the practical cost of misalignment.
    • Research infrastructure and standards bodies, which build the open data and interoperable systems needed to support broader, fairer assessment criteria.

    This tension between what funders say they want and what institutional reward systems actually measure is not a new observation — the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), building on the European Commission’s Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment finalised 20 July 2022, has been pushing the same reform agenda for four years. What the OECD paper adds is a comparative, OECD-wide synthesis rather than a Europe-centred coalition commitment, giving research administrators outside the EU a reference point that isn’t tied to CoARA membership.

    The timing also lines up with parallel European activity: Science Europe published its own position statement, “Connecting Open Science and Research Assessment Reform,” in April 2026, arguing that open science advances and assessment reform are “mutually reinforcing and inter-dependent drivers of research cultures.” Read together, the OECD working paper and the Science Europe statement show the reform agenda converging on the same point from two different institutional angles — global policy synthesis versus funder-coalition advocacy.

    Answer-first Q&A: what people are asking

    What is the OECD’s “New expectations and demands from science” paper?

    It is OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Paper No. 2026/07, published 29 April 2026 as a companion to the OECD’s policy brief “Reforming research assessment for better science.” It provides a system-level literature review mapping the actors, tensions, and drivers behind global research assessment reform, without itself issuing binding recommendations.

    Why does this OECD paper matter for research administrators?

    It gives research administrators and institutional leaders a non-EU-specific, evidence-based reference for redesigning hiring, promotion, and funding-review criteria. Because it maps competing actor interests explicitly, it is more useful for internal policy justification than a short recommendations-only brief.

    What does the OECD say about quantitative indicators in research assessment?

    The paper identifies over-reliance on narrow quantitative indicators — publication counts, citation metrics, journal impact factors — as the central structural problem, arguing it produces perverse incentives and undervalues collaboration, openness, and societal engagement that funders now expect.

    How does this relate to the CoARA reform agreement?

    CoARA’s Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, finalised by the European Commission on 20 July 2022, is a European funder-and-institution coalition commitment. The OECD’s 2026 paper covers similar ground but at OECD-wide scope, functioning as an evidence synthesis rather than a signatory pledge.

    Implications and what comes next

    For research administrators, the practical takeaway is not to wait for a single global standard. The OECD paper’s actor map is a useful diagnostic tool for institutions auditing their own promotion and funding-review criteria against the gap between stated priorities (openness, societal impact, collaboration) and what is actually measured (publication counts and journal placement).

    The convergence of OECD, CoARA, and Science Europe positions in 2026 suggests assessment reform is moving from advocacy toward implementation detail — governance of AI in evaluation, and the shift away from proprietary bibliometric data, are likely to be the next flashpoints. Institutions building or revising assessment frameworks, including those documenting contributor roles through standards such as CRediT, should treat this OECD synthesis as a system-level map to check institutional policy against, not a checklist to copy verbatim. For teams working through the practical mechanics of research administration and assessment criteria, CASRAI’s research administration resources track how these standards intersect with day-to-day institutional practice.

  • DORA vs CoARA: What Administrators Should Know

    DORA vs CoARA are two distinct but connected research-assessment reform initiatives. DORA — the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, launched in 2012 — is a voluntary declaration that asks signatories to stop using journal-based metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor as a proxy for research quality. CoARA — the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, formed in 2022 out of the EU-anchored Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment — asks member organisations to go further: sign ten explicit commitments and publish an implementation action plan. For research administrators deciding where to commit institutional resources, DORA sets the principle; CoARA sets the practice.

    DORA is best understood as a global statement of intent. CoARA is best understood as a structured, governed coalition with working groups, national chapters and reporting obligations. Many organisations do both — CoARA itself describes DORA as a foundational influence rather than a competing framework.

    Contents

    What is DORA?

    The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a declaration developed in December 2012 at the American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting in San Francisco. DORA is a set of recommendations against using journal-based metrics — chiefly the Journal Impact Factor — as a proxy for the quality of individual articles, researchers or institutions.

    The declaration sets out one general recommendation plus tailored recommendations for five stakeholder groups: funding agencies, institutions, publishers, organisations that supply metrics, and researchers themselves. Its central instruction is consistent across all five: assess research on its own scientific merits, not on the reputation of the journal it appears in.

    DORA operates as a signature-based declaration hosted at sfdora.org. There is no membership fee, no mandatory reporting cycle and no central secretariat enforcing compliance — an organisation or individual signs, and DORA relies on public accountability and community pressure to drive change.

    What is CoARA?

    The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) is a coalition of research funders, universities, national academies and other research organisations that formed in 2022 around the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA), finalised that July with support from the European Commission and Science Europe. CoARA is a formal coalition, not a signature-only declaration: joining requires accepting ten explicit commitments and developing a published action plan.

    The ARRA’s ten commitments split into two tiers. Four “core commitments” are mandatory for every signatory, covering peer review as the primary basis of assessment, abandoning inappropriate use of journal- and publication-based metrics including the Journal Impact Factor and h-index, and rejecting the use of institutional rankings in assessment decisions. Six further commitments allow signatories to choose their own pace and approach.

    CoARA is governed through a General Assembly, a Steering Board and thematic Working Groups, and it operates national and regional chapters — including a UK National Chapter co-led by the Universities of Strathclyde, Loughborough and Swansea, according to the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA).

    DORA vs CoARA: key differences

    The two initiatives address overlapping goals through very different mechanisms. The table below summarises the practical distinctions an administrator needs before choosing where to commit.

    Feature DORA CoARA
    Founded 2012, San Francisco 2022, EU-anchored coalition
    Founding document San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA)
    Form of commitment Voluntary signature Formal membership with ten commitments
    Primary target Misuse of journal-based metrics (e.g. Journal Impact Factor) Whole-system reform of research careers and evaluation
    Governance No central secretariat; community-driven General Assembly, Steering Board, working groups, national chapters
    Follow-up obligation None mandatory Published implementation action plan required
    Geographic anchor Global, unaffiliated Originated in Europe; open to global membership

    How CoARA builds on DORA

    CoARA does not compete with DORA — it explicitly builds on it. Both organisations issued a joint statement in December 2025 describing themselves as “two of a diverse and global group of initiatives that share the aim of driving systemic change towards better research assessment,” according to CoARA’s own news pages. Many CoARA member organisations were DORA signatories first.

    Three concrete extensions distinguish CoARA’s approach from DORA’s:

    • From declaration to action plan. DORA asks for a signature; CoARA requires signatories to publish an action plan implementing the ten ARRA commitments within an agreed timeframe.
    • From one metric problem to whole-system reform. DORA’s scope centres on journal-based metrics. CoARA’s core commitments extend to peer review practice, diversity of research outputs, and the rejection of institutional rankings as an assessment tool.
    • From individual signature to governed coalition. DORA has no membership structure beyond its signatory list. CoARA runs a General Assembly, Steering Board, thematic working groups and national chapters — including the UK chapter co-led by Strathclyde, Loughborough and Swansea — that coordinate implementation and share practice across members.

    Which should your institution commit to?

    For most research organisations this is not an either/or choice. DORA signature carries low administrative overhead and signals a clear public position against metric misuse — a reasonable first step for any institution, funder or publisher. CoARA membership is the heavier commitment: it requires governance capacity to produce and report against an action plan, and it suits institutions ready to reform hiring, promotion and evaluation processes at a systemic level, not just at the level of individual metrics.

    Institutions with limited capacity should sign DORA first and use it to build internal consensus before taking on CoARA’s action-plan obligations. Institutions already running research-culture or REF-adjacent reform programmes are better placed to join CoARA directly, since the ten commitments map closely onto work many UK universities are already doing through national chapters and INORMS-linked evaluation groups.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What does DORA stand for in research?

    DORA stands for the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, launched in December 2012. It calls on funders, institutions, publishers and researchers to stop using journal-based metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor as a substitute for evaluating the actual scientific content of research outputs.

    What is CoARA and how does it differ from DORA?

    CoARA is the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, a 2022 coalition built on the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment. Unlike DORA’s voluntary signature, CoARA requires member organisations to accept ten formal commitments and publish an implementation action plan, coordinated through national chapters and working groups.

    What are the DORA principles?

    DORA’s core principle is that research quality must be assessed on its own merits, not on the venue where it is published. Its recommendations cover funding agencies, institutions, publishers, metrics suppliers and researchers, each urged to eliminate journal-based metrics from funding, hiring and promotion decisions.

    Does DORA apply in the UK?

    DORA is a voluntary global declaration, not a UK legal requirement, but numerous UK universities and funders are signatories. UK institutions increasingly reference DORA and CoARA together in responsible-metrics policies connected to REF-related research culture and assessment reform work.

    Implications for research administrators

    The practical takeaway for administrators is a sequencing question, not a binary choice. DORA signature is fast, low-cost and a credible public marker of intent. CoARA membership is a governance commitment that touches hiring panels, promotion criteria and institutional reporting cycles, and it demands sustained capacity from a research-culture or research-strategy office.

    As responsible research assessment moves from advocacy into funder and institutional policy — with UNESCO, Science Europe and national funders increasingly referencing both frameworks — administrators should expect DORA and CoARA to be treated as complementary layers: DORA the founding principle, CoARA the operational coalition that turns it into an implementation plan.

    For related context on how research contributions are formally recognised alongside assessment reform, see CASRAI’s overview of research administration practice.

  • CoARA Signatories: What Institutions Commit To

    Becoming a CoARA signatory means an institution publicly commits to the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment’s ten reform principles, publishes an implementation action plan within one year, and reports progress at least once before completing a first review cycle within five years. It is not legally binding, but it does require sustained institutional resourcing, not a signature alone.

    The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) is a European Commission-convened coalition, formalised by the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment finalised on 20 July 2022, through which universities, funders, and research organisations commit to reduce reliance on journal-based metrics and rankings in evaluating research and researchers.

    What is the CoARA Agreement, and who can sign?

    CoARA grew out of a 2021 European Commission consultation and was launched with the Agreement’s finalisation on 20 July 2022. Signing is open to any organisation involved in research assessment worldwide — universities, research funders, national evaluation agencies, learned societies, and research infrastructures — not only European institutions.

    Signatory status crossed the 500-organisation mark on 29 March 2023, according to CoARA’s own tracking. A 2025 analysis published via RePEc found that 450 European higher education institutions (13% of the sector) had signed by that point, with uptake concentrated among PhD-awarding institutions (27%) and research-intensive universities (52% of that subgroup) — a signal that CoARA’s early adopter base skews toward research-heavy institutions rather than teaching-focused ones.

    Real institutional signatories include the University of Suffolk and the University of Exeter, both of which publish their own CoARA implementation pages describing internal governance changes made after signing.

    The ten commitments: what signatories actually commit to

    Under the CoARA Agreement, every signatory — regardless of size or country — commits to ten commitments covering how it will evaluate research, researchers, and research organisations. These are not aspirational statements; each maps to a concrete practice change an institution is expected to work towards:

    • Recognise the diversity of contributions to research and researchers’ careers, beyond publications alone.
    • Base assessment primarily on qualitative evaluation, with peer review central, supported by responsible use of quantitative indicators.
    • Abandon inappropriate use of journal- and publication-based metrics, including the Journal Impact Factor and h-index, as proxies for quality.
    • Avoid using rankings of research organisations in assessment decisions.
    • Commit the resources needed — staff time, budget, governance attention — to deliver reform, not just endorse it.
    • Review and develop assessment criteria, tools, and processes used across hiring, promotion, and funding decisions.
    • Raise awareness and provide training on responsible assessment for staff involved in evaluation.
    • Exchange practices and experiences with other signatories to support mutual learning.
    • Communicate progress on implementation transparently, on a defined schedule.
    • Evaluate assessment practices, criteria, and tools against evidence, and adjust where they fail.

    Two commitments — abandoning inappropriate metrics and avoiding institutional rankings — are the ones that most directly change day-to-day promotion and hiring committee behaviour, and are typically where research offices meet the most internal resistance during rollout.

    Reporting obligations and the implementation timeline

    Signing triggers a defined, dated sequence rather than an open-ended pledge. Within one year of signing, a signatory must develop and publish an action plan setting out the concrete steps it will take to implement the ten commitments, including which assessment processes it will review first.

    Within five years of signing, the institution is expected to have completed at least one full cycle of reviewing and developing its research assessment criteria, tools, and processes against the commitments. Between those two milestones, CoARA expects signatories to communicate progress periodically rather than waiting until the five-year mark to report anything.

    Milestone Deadline from signing date What is required
    Action plan published Within 1 year Public document setting reform priorities and near-term steps
    Progress communication Ongoing, periodic Transparent reporting on implementation status
    First review cycle complete Within 5 years Assessment criteria, tools, and processes reviewed and revised

    This structure matters for planning: a research office should budget for the action-plan drafting effort in year one, not treat CoARA sign-up as a communications exercise with no near-term deliverable.

    Signatory vs member: choosing the right level of commitment

    CoARA distinguishes two levels of participation, and institutions weighing whether to sign should decide which one they actually want. A signatory commits to the ten commitments and the reporting timeline above. A full member takes on the same commitments plus governance rights — including voting in CoARA’s General Assemblies and standing for working-group roles. As of 12 June 2026, CoARA listed 840 member organisations, reflecting continued growth in institutions choosing the fuller governance-participation route rather than signatory status alone.

    CoARA also operates national and regional chapters, which coordinate implementation support and peer exchange between signatories in a given country or region, between the Coalition’s plenary meetings. For UK research offices, chapter-level exchange is often the most practical channel for benchmarking an action plan against comparable institutions, since chapters convene signatories facing similar national funding and assessment frameworks.

    Institutions frequently ask how CoARA relates to the earlier San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, 2012). DORA is narrower — it focuses specifically on eliminating journal-based metrics from research evaluation — while CoARA is broader, adding a defined action-plan and reporting cadence, formal membership tiers, and a chapter structure. Many UK universities, including Exeter, have signed both, treating DORA as the metrics-specific pledge and CoARA as the wider institutional reform framework.

    Common questions from research offices

    What are the ten CoARA commitments signatories must sign up to?

    Signatories commit to ten principles spanning recognising diverse research contributions, basing assessment primarily on qualitative peer review, abandoning journal-based metrics like the Journal Impact Factor, avoiding institutional rankings, resourcing reform, and reporting progress transparently on a defined schedule.

    How long does it take to become a CoARA signatory?

    Signing itself takes minutes via an online form on the CoARA website, requiring an authorised representative’s confirmation. The real timeline is what follows: a published action plan within one year, and a completed review cycle within five years of the signing date.

    What is the difference between a CoARA signatory and a CoARA member?

    Both accept the ten commitments. A full member additionally gains governance rights, including voting at CoARA’s General Assemblies and eligibility for working groups, while a signatory-only organisation commits to the reform agenda without formal voting participation.

    Is signing the CoARA agreement legally binding?

    No. The CoARA Agreement is a public, non-legally-binding commitment. There is no external enforcement mechanism beyond published action plans and periodic progress reporting, which places the compliance burden on institutional governance and reputational accountability rather than contract law.

    For research offices weighing the decision, the practical question is not whether to endorse fairer assessment in principle — few institutions object to that — but whether the office has the standing capacity to draft an action plan within twelve months and sustain a five-year review cycle against promotion, hiring, and funding-assessment practices that are often owned by separate committees. Institutions that under-resource this step tend to publish thin action plans that stall by year two; those that assign a named owner and align the plan with an existing REF-cycle or research-strategy review timeline see steadier progress. As CoARA’s chapter network and membership base continue to grow past 840 organisations, the practical bar for what a credible action plan looks like is also rising, since chapter peers and evaluators increasingly benchmark new signatories against established ones.

  • DORA vs CoARA: Two Routes to Reform Compared

    DORA and CoARA are the two leading movements for reforming how research and researchers are evaluated, but they take structurally different routes to get there: DORA is an individual and institutional pledge against journal-based metrics, while CoARA is a formal coalition agreement requiring signatories to file a time-bound action plan. Both aim to move assessment away from proxies like the Journal Impact Factor and toward qualitative, peer-reviewed judgement of research contributions.

    The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a global advocacy initiative, founded in San Francisco in 2012, that asks signatories to stop using journal-based metrics as a proxy for the quality of individual researchers’ work. The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) is a European-rooted membership coalition, launched in 2022, whose signatories commit to ten core principles and must submit a formal reform action plan within twelve months. For a research office deciding where to commit institutional resources, the choice is rarely either/or — but the two frameworks demand very different levels of operational follow-through, and understanding that gap is the first step to choosing correctly.

    What is DORA?

    DORA — the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment — began as a set of conversations at the American Society for Cell Biology’s 2012 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. It was formalised as a Declaration in 2013 and became a standalone organisation in 2018, according to DORA’s own institutional history published on sfdora.org.

    DORA’s central ask is narrow and specific: institutions and individuals commit not to use journal-based metrics — chiefly the Journal Impact Factor — as a proxy for the quality of an individual researcher’s contributions in hiring, tenure and funding decisions. Signing is a public, low-friction act. There is no mandatory action plan and no membership fee; DORA instead supports change through advocacy, case studies and practical tools such as its Reformscape database of assessment policies.

    What is CoARA?

    CoARA is a collective of research organisations, funders, assessment authorities and professional societies that have agreed a common direction for research assessment reform, set out in the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA), published in July 2022. As of mid-2026, over 800 organisations have signed the Agreement, according to CoARA’s own membership page.

    Unlike DORA, CoARA distinguishes between two tiers of participation. Signatories publicly endorse the Agreement’s ten core commitments and agree to submit a reform action plan within one year of signing. Members additionally gain voting rights in CoARA’s General Assembly and can shape governance through the Steering Board. Both tiers are free — there are no CoARA membership fees. The Coalition is governed by a General Assembly and Steering Board, with its Secretariat hosted by the European Science Foundation (ESF), and it runs a Horizon Europe-funded capacity-building initiative, CoARA Boost, to support members through implementation.

    DORA vs CoARA: key differences

    The two initiatives are complementary rather than competing, but they differ sharply on scope, accountability and governance structure.

    Feature DORA CoARA
    Origin 2012 (Declaration), organisation since 2018 2022, via the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment
    Geographic centre Global, US-founded European-led, global membership
    Primary focus Eliminating journal-based metrics (e.g. Journal Impact Factor) as a quality proxy Systemic reform of research assessment across outputs, practices and careers
    Commitment level Public declaration; no mandatory follow-up 10 core commitments plus a mandatory action plan within 12 months
    Participation tiers Single tier — signatories Two tiers — signatories and voting members
    Governance DORA organisation, advocacy and tools-led General Assembly, Steering Board, Secretariat hosted by the European Science Foundation
    Local structures Community-of-practice groups (e.g. funders, initiatives) Working Groups and National Chapters (e.g. UK National Chapter, co-led by Loughborough, Strathclyde and Swansea universities)

    The two organisations are not operating in isolation from each other. DORA sits as an institutional observer on the CoARA Steering Board, and CoARA participates in DORA’s National and International Initiatives Community of Practice. On 3–4 December 2025, the two initiatives issued a joint statement at the EU Presidency High-Level Conference on Reforming Research Assessment (CERRA) in Copenhagen, marking CoARA’s third anniversary and formally describing their work as complementary rather than overlapping.

    Which framework should a research office sign?

    The decision depends on how much operational capacity a research office can commit, not on which framework is “better”.

    • Sign DORA first if the institution needs a fast, low-cost public statement against misuse of the Journal Impact Factor in hiring, tenure and promotion — useful as a first move for offices without dedicated reform capacity.
    • Join CoARA if the institution can resource a structured, time-bound reform process — CoARA’s requirement to publish an action plan within 12 months forces assessment policy from principle into practice, with peer support through Working Groups and National Chapters.
    • Sign both, as a growing number of UK institutions have done. The University of Edinburgh, for example, lists itself as a signatory of both DORA and CoARA as part of its responsible research assessment programme.

    One implementation detail is often overlooked: CoARA’s core commitments explicitly call for “recognising the diversity of contributions to, and careers in, research” — a principle that is difficult to operationalise without a mechanism for recording who did what on a given output. The CRediT contributor role taxonomy, which CASRAI originated in 2014 and which is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, is one of the few practical tools that lets an institution move from CoARA’s principle of contribution diversity to a granular, auditable record of it — a link that neither framework’s own documentation makes explicit, but that research administration offices implementing CoARA action plans should factor into their tooling decisions.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is CoARA research assessment?

    CoARA research assessment refers to the evaluation practices reformed under the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, which asks signatories to base judgement on peer review and qualitative assessment of diverse outputs, rather than publication counts or journal prestige, backed by a mandatory action plan.

    What are the DORA principles?

    DORA’s core principle is to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, particularly the Journal Impact Factor, as a proxy for the quality of an individual researcher’s work in funding, hiring, and promotion decisions, focusing evaluation instead on the scientific content of the output itself.

    What does CoARA stand for and who leads it?

    CoARA stands for the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment. It is governed by a General Assembly and Steering Board, with administrative coordination from a Secretariat hosted by the European Science Foundation (ESF).

    Can an institution sign both DORA and CoARA?

    Yes. The two frameworks are formally complementary, not competing — DORA holds observer status on the CoARA Steering Board, and institutions such as the University of Edinburgh are signatories of both as part of a single responsible-assessment programme.

    Both movements are converging rather than diverging. With DORA now an institutional observer inside CoARA’s governance and the two bodies issuing joint statements at EU policy conferences, research offices should treat the DORA-versus-CoARA question less as a binary choice and more as a sequencing decision: a quick public pledge against metric misuse, followed — where capacity allows — by the structured, accountable reform pathway that CoARA’s action-plan requirement enforces.

  • CoARA National Chapters: How Reform Spreads Institution by Institution

    CoARA national chapters are the country-level structures through which the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment turns its 2022 Agreement into local policy. As of mid-2026 there are 20 active chapters across Europe, each translating a shared set of commitments into national funding, hiring, and promotion practice — at very different speeds and with very different levels of traction.

    CoARA is a coalition of more than 800 research organisations, funders, assessment authorities, and professional associations that agreed in July 2022, via the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, to move evaluation away from publication counts and journal-based metrics and toward qualitative, peer-informed judgement. National chapters are the mechanism CoARA built to stop that agreement from staying a Brussels-level document and start it becoming a Warsaw-level, Dublin-level, or Bern-level one.

    What is a CoARA national chapter?

    A CoARA national chapter is a voluntary, member-proposed structure that gives an individual country’s CoARA members a dedicated forum to coordinate reform of research assessment in their own institutional and regulatory context. Chapters are not imposed by the CoARA Secretariat; they are proposed by members from a given country and open to any CoARA member from that country who wants to participate.

    Under CoARA’s own approval guidelines, a national chapter must be inclusive — reaching at least half of the CoARA member organisations in the country concerned — and must put in place mechanisms so that organisations outside CoARA can still contribute to, and benefit from, its work. Chapters commit to producing concrete tasks and outputs within a two-year window, and to feeding lessons learnt back to CoARA’s other national chapters and working groups.

    How many national chapters are there, and where?

    CoARA had 19 established national chapters as of December 2025, according to the Coalition’s own overview booklet published on Zenodo, with the Danish chapter the most recent addition, joining at the end of that year. The live national-chapters listing on coara.org, checked in mid-2026, shows the tally has since reached 20 countries.

    The current roster spans:

    • Andorra, Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary and Ireland
    • Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden
    • Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom

    Five chapters launched almost simultaneously in April 2024 — Switzerland (15 April), Spain (17 April), the Netherlands (22 April), Ireland (24 April) and Germany (26 April) — suggesting a coordinated first wave rather than organic, country-by-country emergence. Denmark’s arrival more than eighteen months later shows the model is still expanding, not just consolidating.

    How a chapter gets approved and what it must deliver

    Forming a national chapter requires a formal application submitted through CoARA’s online proposal form, assessed against published approval guidelines. The bar is deliberately structural rather than symbolic: reaching roughly half of a country’s CoARA member base is a materially harder threshold than gathering a handful of enthusiastic early adopters, and the two-year output clock forces chapters to name concrete deliverables rather than issue a statement of intent.

    CoARA also runs cross-chapter accountability mechanisms that go beyond the initial approval step — including a National Chapters Exchange Forum, whose third edition was held in Madrid, and regional forums such as the June 2026 hybrid event in Budapest on research excellence and language bias in assessment. These recurring forums exist specifically to compare what chapters have actually produced, not just to celebrate that they exist.

    What separates real reform from a signing ceremony

    The clearest predictor of a national chapter’s traction is not how long it has existed but whether it is embedded in a pre-existing national reform mechanism or built from scratch as a standalone forum. Chapters that plug into a national instrument that already has regulatory or institutional weight move faster than chapters whose only function, so far, is knowledge exchange between members.

    National chapter Launch signal Core mechanism Reform indicator
    Netherlands 22 April 2024 Extension of the existing national “Recognition & Rewards” programme Embedded in pre-existing reform infrastructure
    Norway Established chapter Shared development of institutional versions of the NORCAM career-assessment framework Embedded in a national assessment tool
    Poland Established chapter Formal review of coherence between CoARA commitments and Polish national regulation Statutory/regulatory alignment function
    Switzerland 15 April 2024 Cross-cantonal, cross-linguistic coordination of universities, universities of applied sciences and funders Structural federated-governance bridge
    Ireland 24 April 2024 Knowledge exchange on peer review, promotion criteria and funder DORA adoption Concrete but not yet statutory
    Denmark Late 2025 New national stakeholder-engagement platform Too early to assess traction

    Poland’s chapter is the sharpest illustration of the distinction. Its stated mission is not simply to discuss CoARA’s principles but to assess whether the Coalition’s agreed solutions are even compatible with existing Polish law, and to propose the national regulatory changes needed to implement them. That is a policy-drafting function, not a discussion group — and it is precisely the kind of concrete, two-year-deliverable output the approval guidelines require but cannot themselves guarantee.

    By contrast, a chapter whose public description is limited to “providing a platform for exchange” carries real signing-ceremony risk until it can point to a specific institutional policy, funder criterion, or promotion-committee rule it changed. Research administrators evaluating whether to lean on a given country’s chapter for benchmarking should ask for that named deliverable before assuming the chapter reflects binding national practice.

    Common questions and what comes next

    What is a CoARA National Chapter?

    A CoARA National Chapter is a country-level, member-proposed group within the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment that coordinates local implementation of the 2022 Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment. It must involve at least half of that country’s CoARA member organisations and deliver concrete outputs within two years.

    How many CoARA national chapters are there?

    CoARA confirms 19 established national chapters as of December 2025, with Denmark the most recent addition. The Coalition’s live national-chapters page shows the current total has since reached 20 countries, spanning most of the European Research Area plus Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

    What is the difference between a CoARA signatory and a CoARA member?

    A signatory has endorsed CoARA’s 10 core commitments and agreed to submit an action plan within a year; a full member has additionally joined the Coalition’s governance, gaining voting rights at the General Assembly. Both routes are free, and signatories can upgrade to member status at any time.

    How does an organisation start a CoARA National Chapter?

    A group of CoARA members from the same country applies via CoARA’s online proposal form against published approval guidelines, demonstrating support from at least half of the country’s member organisations. Approved chapters then have two years to produce named, concrete outputs supporting the Agreement’s national implementation.

    The national-chapter model is CoARA’s answer to a structural problem every voluntary standards coalition faces: a shared agreement signed by a research office in Brussels or a funder in Paris changes nothing on its own inside a promotion committee in Kraków or a hiring panel in Bergen. Chapters are the deliberate, two-year-clocked mechanism for closing that gap — and the growing cadence of exchange forums suggests CoARA itself is aware that some chapters will close it faster than others.

    For research administration teams tracking which national frameworks are worth benchmarking against, the practical takeaway is to look past chapter existence and ask what the chapter has actually produced against its two-year commitment — a published criterion, a revised promotion policy, a funder mandate — rather than treating membership in a CoARA national chapter as evidence of reform on its own. Institutions building out their own research administration capacity should watch the chapters embedded in pre-existing national instruments most closely, since those are the ones with the shortest path from commitment to enforceable practice.

  • What Is CoARA? The Coalition Reshaping Research Assessment

    CoARA — the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment — is a coalition of research funders, universities, and academies that formally commits its signatories to base research evaluation primarily on qualitative, peer-reviewed judgement rather than journal metrics and rankings. Launched via the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment in July 2022 and formally constituted in December 2022, CoARA now counts more than 800 signatory organisations working through national chapters and working groups to reform hiring, promotion, and funding criteria.

    CoARA is not a certification body or a single standard — it is a coalition structure built around a shared Agreement, a set of principles, and a menu of commitments that each signatory adapts to its own national and disciplinary context.

    What is CoARA and where did it come from?

    CoARA emerged from a two-year mutual learning exercise on research assessment reform that the European Commission ran alongside Science Europe and the European University Association (EUA), culminating in the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment being released in July 2022. Around 350 organisations formally adopted CoARA’s governance documents, rules of procedure, and code of conduct at the Coalition’s Constitutive Assembly on 1 December 2022, according to Science Europe’s official record of the meeting.

    The Coalition is explicitly framed as a European Research Area initiative with global reach: signatories include universities, funders, and academies well outside the EU. Horizon Europe has continued to underwrite the Coalition’s operating capacity directly — the CoARA Boost project (CORDIS grant 101131826) funds a cascade programme that supports pilot assessment reforms across member organisations rather than treating the Agreement as a one-off declaration.

    What does the CoARA Agreement actually commit signatories to?

    The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment rests on 10 guiding principles and 10 commitments, split into four core commitments every signatory must pursue and six supporting commitments that describe how reform should be resourced and communicated.

    • Recognise the diversity of contributions to and careers in research, beyond publication counts.
    • Base assessment primarily on qualitative judgement, with peer review central and quantitative indicators used only to support it.
    • Ensure any use of journal- and publication-based metrics — including the Journal Impact Factor and h-index — is responsible and ethical.
    • Avoid using institutional rankings in the assessment of individual researchers or units.
    • Commit the resources needed to reform assessment practices.
    • Review and develop assessment criteria, tools, and processes.
    • Raise awareness and provide training on new criteria.
    • Exchange practices and experiences within and beyond the Coalition.
    • Communicate progress publicly against the commitments.
    • Evaluate reforms using solid evidence and make data openly available.

    The first four items above are the core commitments; the remaining six are supporting commitments. Every signatory publishes its own action plan within one year of signing, setting institution-specific milestones against this shared list — the Agreement deliberately avoids prescribing a single implementation template.

    How does CoARA relate to DORA?

    CoARA and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) share a target — the misuse of journal-level metrics in individual assessment — but differ in scope, governance, and mechanism. DORA, launched in 2012, is a shorter declaration signatories endorse with comparatively light follow-through obligations. CoARA is a formally constituted coalition with governance documents, a Steering Board, mandatory action plans, and a network of national chapters.

    Feature DORA CoARA
    Launched 2012, San Francisco July 2022 (Agreement); constituted December 2022
    Primary focus Ending Journal Impact Factor misuse Systemic reform of hiring, promotion, and funding assessment
    Governance Declaration with voluntary sign-on Formal coalition, Steering Board, code of conduct
    Follow-through No mandatory action plan Action plan required within 1 year of signing
    Regional anchor Originated in the US biology community European Research Area–facilitated, global signatories

    Many institutions sign both: DORA and CoARA are complementary rather than competing, and CoARA’s own principles explicitly build on the earlier metrics-reform movement DORA started.

    What changes for a hiring or promotion committee after signing?

    Signing the Agreement is a distinct step from becoming a CoARA Member — a distinction most explainer coverage of CoARA skips entirely. Any organisation involved in research assessment can sign; only signatories that separately apply for Member status gain voting rights at CoARA’s General Assemblies and a seat in collective governance decisions. Membership carries no fee.

    For a hiring or promotion committee, the practical shift plays out over that first year:

    • Publication of an institution-specific action plan mapping current criteria against the 10 commitments.
    • Review of hiring, promotion, and tenure criteria to reduce reliance on the Journal Impact Factor and h-index as proxies for quality.
    • Piloting of narrative CV formats that let researchers describe contributions — datasets, software, mentoring, public engagement — in context rather than as a metrics table.
    • Training for panel members and administrators on the new criteria before they are applied to live decisions.

    Committees should expect a phased transition, not an overnight switch: CoARA’s commitments are directional and self-paced, so two signatory institutions can be at very different points of implementation at the same time.

    What do CoARA’s working groups and national chapters do?

    CoARA’s first Working Groups and National Chapters formed from September 2022 onward, giving signatories two parallel routes to collaborate: Working Groups tackle a specific reform topic (such as narrative CVs or open science indicators) across borders, while National Chapters — including the UK CoARA National Chapter — adapt the Agreement’s commitments to a single country’s funding and academic-employment context.

    The UK National Chapter, for example, brings together universities and funders to share how REF-adjacent assessment practices can align with CoARA’s qualitative-first principle without duplicating existing UK compliance frameworks.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What is the CoARA Agreement?

    The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment is the founding document signatories commit to, built on 10 principles and 10 commitments — four core, six supporting. It sets a shared direction and timeframe for reform while leaving implementation detail to each signatory’s own action plan.

    Is CoARA the same as DORA?

    No. DORA is a 2012 declaration focused narrowly on ending Journal Impact Factor misuse. CoARA is a formally governed coalition, launched in 2022, with mandatory action plans, a Steering Board, and a broader systemic-reform mandate that many institutions adopt alongside DORA.

    What are CoARA working groups?

    Working Groups are cross-border teams of signatories that develop practical tools and evidence on a specific reform theme, such as narrative CVs or responsible metrics. They formed alongside CoARA’s National Chapters from September 2022 and report progress back to the full Coalition.

    How many organisations have signed CoARA?

    More than 800 organisations had signed the Agreement as of 2026, according to CoARA’s own signatory registry — up from roughly 350 at the Coalition’s December 2022 Constitutive Assembly. Signatory numbers are published and updated on CoARA’s website.

    Implications for research administrators

    For research administrators, CoARA’s practical weight sits in the action-plan cycle, not the signature itself. A signature commits leadership to intent; the action plan is the document auditors, funders, and REF-adjacent panels will actually reference. Administrators drafting or reviewing hiring and promotion criteria should treat the four core commitments as a checklist against existing forms and rubrics — particularly any surviving requirement to state a Journal Impact Factor or numeric ranking.

    Funders that have signed layer a further obligation: grant assessment panels trained under CoARA’s principles must be able to justify qualitative judgements on record, which changes what evidence applicants are asked to submit.

    Where CoARA goes next

    CoARA’s trajectory depends on converting signatures into audited action-plan delivery — the Coalition’s own commitment to “communicate progress” implies a maturing accountability layer as more institutions pass their one-year and multi-year review points. Horizon Europe’s continued funding of the CoARA Boost cascade programme signals that the European Commission expects national chapters, not just the central Coalition, to carry implementation forward. Institutions evaluating whether to sign should read the Agreement’s commitments, not just its principles — the commitments are what an action plan, and eventually an audit, will be measured against.

    For related standards work on documenting research contributions, see CASRAI’s coverage of research administration practice and the CASRAI dictionary of research-assessment terminology.

  • Narrative CVs Explained: A Practical Template Guide for Funders and Institutions

    Research administrators preparing institutional guidance ahead of the REF 2029 cycle are increasingly asking the same question: what does a good narrative CV academia example actually look like, and how do we build a template our researchers will actually use? The shift away from publication counts and journal impact factors toward structured, narrative-style CVs — pioneered by UKRI’s Résumé for Research and Innovation and echoed in funder policies across Europe — is no longer experimental. It is fast becoming the default expectation for grant applications, promotion cases, and fellowship reviews.

    The pressure is coming from several directions at once. The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has spent a decade arguing that journal-level metrics are poor proxies for the quality of individual contributions. The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) — whose CoARA agreement now counts hundreds of signatory universities, funders, and national agencies — commits members to reforming assessment criteria to reward openness, collaboration, and societal contribution alongside traditional outputs. UKRI’s own narrative CV format, built around the Résumé for Research and Innovation, has been mandatory for many grant schemes since 2021 and continues to expand into new panels as the REF 2029 cycle takes shape.

    For institutions still relying on traditional CV templates, this creates a practical gap: researchers need concrete examples and adaptable structures, not just policy statements. This piece sets out what a workable narrative CV template looks like in practice, how it aligns with responsible metrics principles, and what research administrators should build now.

    A Narrative CV Academia Example: Inside the UKRI Résumé for Research and Innovation

    UKRI’s Résumé for Research and Innovation format organises a career narrative around four headings rather than a chronological list of outputs:

    • Contributions to the generation of knowledge — research outputs, but framed around significance and contribution rather than volume or venue.
    • Contributions to the development of individuals — mentoring, supervision, training delivery, and team leadership.
    • Contributions to the wider research community — peer review, editorial roles, committee service, and infrastructure work.
    • Contributions to broader society — public engagement, policy influence, and translation of research into practice.

    Applicants are asked to select a limited number of contributions under each heading and describe, in plain narrative prose, what they did, why it mattered, and what role they played — particularly important for collaborative or multi-author work where a simple author list obscures individual contribution. This is precisely where the CRediT contributor role taxonomy becomes useful as a supporting tool. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, and the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022; the fourteen defined roles (conceptualisation, methodology, investigation, funding acquisition, and so on) give applicants a controlled vocabulary for describing exactly what they contributed to a joint output, rather than relying on author position or vague phrasing such as “significant contribution.”

    Other funders and institutions have adapted similar structures. The Swiss National Science Foundation, the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and several UK universities’ promotion frameworks now use comparable narrative sections, typically capped at two to four pages, with explicit prompts to avoid journal names, impact factors, or citation counts as stand-alone evidence of quality.

    Why Narrative Formats Align with DORA, CoARA, and the Leiden Manifesto

    Narrative CVs did not emerge in isolation. They are the practical expression of three overlapping reform movements that research administrators should understand as a connected policy landscape rather than separate initiatives:

    • DORA asks institutions to stop using journal impact factor as a proxy for the quality of individual research articles, and to evaluate scientific content on its own merits.
    • The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics sets out ten principles for the responsible use of research metrics, including that quantitative evaluation should support, not replace, qualitative expert assessment, and that metrics should be transparent and verifiable to those being evaluated.
    • The CoARA agreement operationalises both, committing signatories to a multi-year reform trajectory that recognises a diversity of outputs and moves away from inappropriate uses of metrics such as journal impact factor and h-index in individual assessment.

    Together these frameworks describe what responsible research metrics look like in practice: quantitative indicators used transparently, alongside — never instead of — qualitative judgement about actual contribution. A narrative CV is the assessment instrument that makes this operational at the level of an individual application or promotion case. It forces panels to read what someone actually did, rather than defaulting to citation counts or journal prestige as a shortcut.

    This matters because the responsible use of research metrics is not simply an ethical preference; it is increasingly a compliance requirement. Funders that have signed the CoARA agreement are expected to demonstrate progress against its commitments in periodic reporting, and institutional promotion committees are under growing scrutiny — from researchers, unions, and equality bodies — to show that assessment criteria do not systematically disadvantage early-career staff, caring responsibilities, or non-traditional research paths.

    Building an Adaptable Narrative CV Template for Your Institution

    Research administrators do not need to invent a format from scratch. A workable institutional template can be adapted directly from the UKRI structure, with three practical additions:

    • A CRediT-referenced contributions table. Alongside the narrative prose, ask applicants to tag their top outputs with CRediT roles. This gives panels an at-a-glance, standardised way to see contribution type without reading full narrative text for every output.
    • Explicit word or character limits per section. UKRI’s model works because it is bounded — typically around 250 words per contribution. Unbounded narrative sections tend to reproduce the same volume problem narrative CVs were designed to solve.
    • Panel training guidance, not just applicant guidance. The most common implementation failure is training applicants to write narrative CVs while leaving assessment panels to fall back on old habits — scanning for journal names and citation counts. Any template rollout should be paired with a short panel briefing on how to read and score narrative content consistently.

    Institutions adopting this approach should also publish a short worked example — a genuinely useful narrative CV academia example drawn from a real (anonymised or composite) case — alongside the template itself. Researchers consistently report that abstract guidance is far less useful than seeing one well-written section under each heading.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    The practical implications for research administration offices are immediate and cut across several functions. Grants offices need to update internal application checklists so that narrative CV sections are reviewed pre-submission, since panels will reject applications that revert to a standard chronological CV. Promotion and tenure committees need updated criteria documents that explicitly reference contribution-based narrative rather than output count, with clear guidance on how CRediT-tagged contributions should be weighted. Research information systems (CRIS platforms) should be checked for the ability to export CRediT role data alongside publication records, since manually reconstructing contribution history for every grant round is not sustainable at scale.

    There is also a change-management dimension. Senior academics who built careers under metric-heavy assessment regimes may be the most resistant to narrative formats, viewing them as subjective or time-consuming. Framing the change around the Leiden Manifesto’s evidence base — that metrics-only assessment produces systematic distortions, including gaming behaviour and disincentives for open, collaborative, or translational work — tends to land better with sceptical audiences than framing built purely around funder compliance.

    A Direction of Travel, Not a Passing Trend

    Narrative CVs are not a temporary funder fashion. They are the assessment-level implementation of a decade-long reform movement running through DORA, the Leiden Manifesto, and now the CoARA agreement’s institutional commitments. As REF 2029 preparations accelerate and more funders align their application formats with UKRI’s approach, institutions that have already built adaptable templates, panel training, and CRediT-referenced contribution records will be better positioned than those treating each funder’s narrative format as a one-off compliance exercise. The practical work now sits squarely with research administrators: translate policy commitment into templates, guidance, and panel practice that researchers can actually use.