Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

🚀 Calling all researchers! 🚀 Share your early-stage research—negative data, new protocols, or unreplicated results— and enter the ASAPbio 2024 Poster Competition! 🧪📊 Two $500 prizes up for grabs! 🎉 📅 Deadline: Dec 1, 2024. 🔗 https://buff.ly/488V7wh #OpenScience

Entering into the autumn season, the November edition of the CoARA Newsletter brings numerous announcements. Read more to discover key updates on upcoming events, leadership opportunities, Cascade Funding announcements, and the latest activities from Working Groups and National Chapters. #ReformingRA #CoARANews

Congratulations to all the winners- and especially Kelly! Work such as this is not often recognised, so it’s great when it is.

Congratulations to our co-Chair, Kelly Cobey, for her nomination for this prize! https://lnkd.in/geauyDiy

In recent years, the landscape of research assessment has been evolving to better recognize and reward open scholarship and preprints. This shift is driven by funding organizations and academic institutions that seek to enhance transparency, accessibility, and equity in research. In this piece from our blog, Zen Faulkes and Haley Hazlett from Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) explore: ➡️ The reform of research assessment and increasing recognition of preprints. ➡️ The movement of open scholarship looking to change how scholarly knowledge is shared, and to address global inequities in scholarly culture itself. ➡️ How to build trust in “non-traditional” outputs through transparent research practices. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gKcQRp_a

We have made our biggest update to #Reformscape yet! We recently added fifteen 1️⃣5️⃣ new institutions and thirty-five 3️⃣5️⃣ new examples of responsible research assessment practices and polices. (And we fixed a bug 🐜.) https://lnkd.in/efj6dz4j

DORA’s guidance on responsible use of quantitative indicators suggests 5 principles, like: Be specific: How well does the indicator refer to the qualities of the person or the piece of work being assessed? Be mindful of aggregate metrics. https://lnkd.in/eNKv_cAP (PDF)

Since January, I've been leading a Research England-funded project at Imperial College London, focussed on fostering a #researchculture that recognises and incentivises #openness and #quality. The first phase of the "Beyond #OpenResearch" project looked at the challenges and opportunities of embedding #transparency, quality and #scrutiny into the #researchdata lifecycle. The team ran workshops involving #researchers, professional, technical and operational (PTO) staff, and the public – often bringing these voices together for the first time. We also interviewed experts, and Dr Jeremy Cohen led a second run of the well-received Research #Software Champions scheme involving #PhD students. We found researchers really want to be open about #data, and support policies to promote good practice in data and software management. There's a public demand for transparency and #reliability when data, #models and #ArtificialIntelligence are used in decision-making. And you absolutely must include PTO staff to fully understand challenges and develop appropriate solutions. So, if everyone agrees, what's stopping us? This is why research culture matters. There's plenty of high-quality research at Imperial and elsewhere, but the global research environment doesn’t offer the time or resources to prioritise good research practice. The focus on journal articles, particularly those in high-impact-factor journals, creates a perverse "publish-or-perish" culture that incentivises cutting corners. Metrics like the #impactfactor and h-index, used to secure jobs and grants, have little to do with research quality. As proxies, they force researchers to chase publishing over focussing on quality. If not journal-based metrics, then what matters for quality and reliability? We are trying to understand this and realign incentives towards what matters, working with groups like the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN). In phase II, we’ll begin implementing these ideas. We’ll develop a proof-of-concept for meaningful research data management with the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences and explore #publicengagement with fundamental research. Acknowledging Imperial's commitment to the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the focus of the upcoming The Research Excellence Framework (REF), we'll aim to find ways to support researchers to meaningfully demonstrate openness and be recognised for it. I want to draw attention to our additional work with the producer Peter Schmidt on his CodeForThought podcast series (https://lnkd.in/eQeQs6f6), and the illustrator Rae Goddard, who provided an amazing graphic from workshop 4 on recognition and incentives (below). Our findings will soon be released on Imperial's Open Research webpages, alongside the processed workshop and interview data. Thanks to our colleagues and collaborators, including Asher Jesper-Mir Consulting (Rebecca Asher and Emily Jesper-Mir, who contributed to all of the workshops).

We made a little improvement to our map 🗺 of DORA signatories on https://lnkd.in/e_izmJC9 DORA had a map for a long time showing that supporters came from around the world. 🌍 But we reached a point where almost every country had at least one 1️⃣ person sign. It almost looked like DORA conquered the world. We knew there was more work to do and wanted a map that would give the viewer a better idea 🤔 of where there was more DORA activity. We scaled it to population so that larger, more populous countries wouldn't dominate the map. Not as brightly colored but much more informative. You can hover your mouse cursor over a country to see the raw number of signers and the number per million people. Enjoy this new look into interest in research assessment reforms!

Duncan E. Wright argues that problems of getting peer reviewers, research fraud, paper mills, predatory journals, and trivial papers are all symptoms of research culture emphasizing quantity over quality. https://lnkd.in/eYdBPArM