CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: DORA declaration

  • 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.

  • Open Research Europe Impact Factor & Indexing

    Open Research Europe has no official Clarivate Journal Impact Factor (JIF), and by explicit policy it never will. The European Commission’s open-access publishing platform for Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 beneficiaries deliberately rejects journal-level metrics in favour of article-level indicators, aligning itself with the DORA Declaration and the Leiden Manifesto.

    Open Research Europe (ORE) is a no-fee, open-access publishing platform launched in 2021 by the European Commission, built on F1000-derived publishing infrastructure, that carries Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020-funded research through an author-driven, post-publication open peer-review process. That structural choice — publish first, review openly afterwards — is precisely what makes the “impact factor” question harder to answer than a simple yes or no, and it is why ORE’s Scopus listing and its absence from Web of Science are so often confused with each other.

    Does Open Research Europe Have a Journal Impact Factor?

    No. Open Research Europe has never held a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor and has stated it will not pursue one. The COST-ORE webinar Question and Answer document is unambiguous on this point: “Open Research Europe does not have an Impact Factor (IF) and will not have one in the future.” This is a design decision, not a shortfall — ORE is structured around article-level metrics rather than a single journal-wide citation average.

    Some third-party indexing directories nonetheless display a figure they label an “impact score” or “Impact IF” for ORE, often citing a value around 1.4–1.9. These figures are not the Clarivate JIF. They are derived from Scopus citation data by commercial indexing-metrics sites, and they should not be quoted on a CV or grant application as a Journal Impact Factor, because no such official figure exists for ORE.

    What Does Scopus Indexing Mean for ORE Articles?

    Scopus indexing means an ORE article has cleared enough of a quality bar — completed open peer review, stable versioning, sustained publication activity — to be catalogued in Elsevier’s abstract-and-citation database. Per LIBER Europe’s ORE FAQ, articles are included in Google Scholar immediately on publication, but are only picked up by Scopus and Inspec once they pass peer review.

    Scopus coverage delivers three concrete benefits for authors:

    • Discoverability — articles surface in the citation searches institutions and publishers run by default.
    • Evaluator recognition — many national assessment exercises and promotion committees treat Scopus coverage as a baseline quality signal.
    • Citation tracking — Scopus data feeds the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), the metric ORE actually reports in place of a JIF.

    According to SCImago Journal & Country Rank (data as of March 2026), ORE sits in the Q2 quartile of the Multidisciplinary category for 2023, 2024 and 2025, with an SJR of 0.391 in 2025 — up from 0.280 in 2023.

    Is Open Research Europe Indexed in Web of Science?

    As of mid-2026, Open Research Europe is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science (WoS) core collection, though WoS inclusion is a stated ambition for the platform. This matters directly for the impact-factor question, because Web of Science coverage is the prerequisite Clarivate requires before it will calculate a Journal Impact Factor for any title.

    In practice, this means ORE’s absence from WoS and its absence of a JIF are the same fact stated two ways: no WoS record, no JIF eligibility. Researchers who need WoS-indexed output for a specific funder or national assessment requirement should verify ORE’s current WoS status directly before submitting, since indexing applications are described by ORE itself as ongoing.

    Why Does Post-Publication Peer Review Complicate the Comparison?

    ORE publishes an article before formal peer review begins, then runs an open, invited, named-reviewer process afterwards — authors must nominate at least five potential reviewers and keep sourcing names until two reports are published. Each revision produces its own version with its own DOI, so a single ORE article can exist as multiple citable, indexable records.

    LIBER Europe’s FAQ flags a genuine downstream problem this creates for librarians and indexers: databases that ingest every version risk flagging near-duplicate records for removal, while databases that keep only the latest version may lose citation history from earlier versions. This versioning mechanic — not just the absence of a JIF — is a structural reason why ORE resists being scored on the same axis as a conventional subscription or hybrid journal.

    How ORE’s Citation Data Compares, Year by Year

    Article-level growth is the metric ORE wants evaluated, and the underlying Scopus-sourced data shows a platform still scaling rather than a mature, steady-state journal.

    Year Documents published SJR Total cites Cites per document
    2022 117 — 87 1.554
    2023 151 0.280 247 1.428
    2024 196 0.376 532 1.642
    2025 221 0.391 899 1.938

    Source: SCImago Journal & Country Rank, metrics based on Scopus data as of March 2026.

    One further data point exposes a common misreading. SCImago’s Journal Value tool models an “estimated APC” for ORE of roughly $2,742 for 2025, calculated purely from its SJR and output volume. That figure is a statistical estimate, not a real charge: under LIBER Europe’s FAQ, ORE authors pay nothing, because the European Commission covers all publication costs directly for eligible Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 beneficiaries. Treating the modelled APC as an actual fee is a documented source of confusion worth correcting explicitly.

    Common Questions About ORE’s Impact Factor and Indexing

    Does Open Research Europe Have an Official Impact Factor?

    No. Open Research Europe has confirmed it does not have, and will not seek, a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor. It reports article-level indicators — citations, views, downloads and reviewer reports — instead, consistent with the DORA Declaration and the Leiden Manifesto on responsible research assessment.

    What Is Open Research Europe?

    Open Research Europe is the European Commission’s open-access publishing platform for research funded under Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and Euratom. It offers rapid, no-fee publication across 14 article types and six discipline areas, with an open, post-publication peer-review process.

    Is It Good to Publish in Open Access Platforms Like ORE?

    For eligible Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 beneficiaries, ORE satisfies open-access and data-sharing mandates at no author cost while granting Scopus and Google Scholar discoverability. Researchers needing Web of Science-indexed output for a specific funder requirement should confirm current coverage before submitting.

    Implications for Authors, Institutions and Evaluators

    Research offices and evaluators should treat ORE’s metrics profile as a feature of the platform’s design, not a data gap to be filled in with an unofficial number. Institutional guidance to authors should explicitly state that quoting a scraped “impact score” for ORE on a grant application or CV is inaccurate, since no Clarivate JIF exists.

    Research administration teams responsible for tracking funder compliance and output reporting are better served citing ORE’s Scopus indexing status, SJR quartile and article-level citation counts — the same figures ORE itself publishes on every article’s dedicated metrics page.

    Outlook: What Happens Next

    The European Commission confirmed in a 26 March 2026 announcement that it is entering “a new era for Open Research Europe,” committing to continued funding for the platform and exploring its expansion to serve funders beyond the EU research programmes, potentially under a broader diamond open-access model with no author-facing fees. Whether that expansion brings a change to ORE’s metrics philosophy remains an open question, but nothing in the Commission’s public statements to date signals a reversal of the no-JIF policy. Institutions tracking ORE for compliance or assessment purposes should monitor the platform’s own indexing page directly, since Web of Science status and any future database applications are updated there as they are achieved.