What is the new policy?

Beginning on January 1, 2025, organizations and institutions that sign DORA will need to submit a public statement at the time of signing to be approved. Previously, organizations were asked to post a public statement when they signed DORA, but signatures would be approved without them, on the expectation that public statements would be forthcoming.

Why is the policy changing?

In November 2022, DORA announced its original outreach policy. This policy had a built-in “sunset clause” that required DORA leadership to review the policy in December, 2023 based on the learnings from the previous year. A task force from the DORA Steering Committee was struck to review the policy. As part of that review, DORA staff reviewed the websites of organization signatories and found that very few posted the requested public statement. This suggested that the first version of this policy was not having the desired effects, such as insuring that organizations’ communities are informed about implementation of DORA principles.

The task force also noted that organizations similar to DORA had more stringent requirements for members, and organizations were still willing to join.

DORA has now existed for ten years. While agreements to principles are still valuable and necessary parts of consciousness raising and awareness, it is time for organizations to move towards implementing DORA principles. We believe public statements are a useful starting point for organizations to articulate where they are in their reform practices and how they aspire to improve them.

What about organizations that have already signed DORA?

We will continue to encourage these organizations to post a statement. We will be reaching out to as many existing signatories as possible to suggest to them that they devise and post a public statement by January 1, 2026 and submit it to DORA staff. DORA staff will update the database as new public statements are received.

How do I know who has posted a statement?

The DORA signatory page will be updated to show the link to the public statement alongside the name of the organization.

What should be in a public statement?

Below are five steps to guide the writing of a statement:

1. Identify your institution and describe the institution’s goals or priorities regarding research assessment. For example, “Our institution is a research extensive university that seeks to engage our undergraduates in research, and to ensure faculty who do so are rewarded for that work,” or “Our institution values research that impacts our regional community and is accessible in their preferred language, and we seek to ensure research outputs are not biased against non-English publications.”
2. Describe DORA and link to the DORA website. For example “The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a global initiative dedicated to improving research assessment practices”. You may also include a DORA signatory badge.
3. Indicate when the institution signed DORA and how DORA’s principles align with institutional goals. For example, “The institution signed DORA in July, 2024. Reducing our reliance on journal Impact Factors will allow our researchers a wider array of publishing options in our regional language.”
4. Describe any current plans regarding research assessment and DORA implementation, with links or documents if possible (e.g., consultations, policies, strategic plans, training). For example, “The Department will be creating a task force to review its assessment practices, and is tasked with delivering a strategic plan by the end of the calendar year.”
5. Provide contact information to relevant individual(s) or office(s) responsible for research assessment and DORA implementation. For example, “The implementation of DORA in the college is being administered by the Dean’s office. Questions can be directed to the Associate Dean at <email address>.”

Some examples of previous statements are below. Because they were published before this guidance, not all examples contain all of the elements listed above, but they fulfilled the original mandate to provide a public recognition of the support for DORA on their own website.

Examples of statements by universities:

• AECC Community College
• Coventry University
• Queensland University of Technology
• University of Calgary
• University of Tokyo

Examples of statements by journals or publishers:

• Revista Cientifica da UMC
• Research Lake International
• Publications scientifiques sur Museum national d’Histoire naturelle

Examples of statement by a funding agency and organizations:

• Japan Science and Technology Agency
• Science Integrity Alliance

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Publishing requires constant innovation and renewal in order for it to remain relevant. eLife has disrupted the traditional model of scholarly publishing: since its inception, innovation and academic-led publishing have been at the core of eLife‘s policies and processes. Presently, their peer review model requires submissions to be preprinted prior to peer review, followed by the publication of the  papers’ reviews alongside the article together with an eLife Assessment as “a Reviewed Preprint”. In this publishing model, there is no binary determination of acceptance or rejection after peer review. This approach addresses the fact that articles submitted, reviewed, and rejected at one journal tend to ultimately get published elsewhere (and consequently indexed), often unchanged.  eLife’s model has provided valuable innovation in peer review and hands control back to the authors of the research.

The recent announcement by Clarivate that they have suspended indexing of eLife from the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), and by association from being eligible for a Journal Impact Factor, highlights the overt challenges to disrupt and innovate in the scholarly publishing system.  Clarivate have indicated this is because they want to only index a curated feed of papers from eLife rather than all the papers that undergo peer review, regardless of outcome. Since eLife has been put on hold, Chinese authors have either stopped submitting and others have withdrawn, indicating the strong dependence of the Journal Impact Factor on author perceptions in China. In some jurisdictions, including China, journal articles must be indexed in Web of Science to “count”.  This move may also limit the discoverability of eLife’s articles.

This development  reinforces how a commercial entity such as Clarivate, can, through its ownership of scholarly databases and indices, hold the academic community to ransom. Clarivate’s announcement is disappointing as it both punishes innovation in peer review and disregards the important role of authors in deciding how and where their research should be published.

As funders and institutions increasingly move away from using single metrics to assess research(ers), the role of Journal Impact Factors is becoming increasingly irrelevant. We know, for example, that funder journals such as Open Research Europe, Wellcome Open Research and Gates Open Research, and indeed all the F1000 titles, have never had a Journal Impact Factor and do not need it to show the impact that they have within their communities.

eLife has long been a supporter of DORA and was an early signatory. Our view is that the innovative initiatives by eLife and others are crucial to ensuring that scholarly communication continues to evolve in a variety of ways to meet the changing needs of the research ecosystem in the 21st century. We are concerned by the action that Clarivate is taking, but not because of the possibility that eLife will not be eligible for a Journal Impact Factor but because Clarivate can use its market dominance to shut down innovation.

We therefore support eLife and encourage it to continue its innovation and encourage other journals to consider doing the same.

The post Clarivate’s actions regarding eLife: DORA’s response appeared first on DORA.

The idea for the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment was conceived at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), and the declaration itself was announced in May 2013. After five years of dedicated effort, DORA has been signed by thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations including universities, funders and publishers. The movement placed renewed attention on the misuse of journal-based metrics, such as the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), and focused on the task of freeing research assessment from their influence.

There is still much to do. The plan now is to intensify our efforts. With funding and in-kind support from the American Society for Cell Biology, Cancer Research UK, the Company of Biologists, eLife, EMBO, F1000, Hindawi, PLOS, and Wellcome, we have been able to hire a Community Manager, Dr. Anna Hatch, who will be dedicated to coordinating efforts. We also have a newly formed steering group, chaired by myself, which will actively promote DORA. Please feel free to invite any of us to your conference, workshop, university or place of work to talk about research assessment and what DORA can do to help facilitate change. Finally, to help ensure that our collective efforts are well-directed and truly global in scope, we are assembling a broad-based Advisory Group.

As well as raising DORA’s profile, a major task will be to help individuals and institutions bring about real change in research assessment practices. To many people the JIF feels like a convenient and ready-made tool for gauging research performance in hiring, promotion or funding decisions, particularly at triage stages where there are large volumes of applicants and applications. We need to encourage people to think more broadly about assessment – not just the research aspects – but we also need to provide tools to create change in a robust and time-efficient manner. Only by facilitating practical steps will the stranglehold of bad metrics be broken.

We have started highlighting good practices on our website. But we are sure there must be many more examples and are keen to find and share them with you. We would like to facilitate discussion between practitioners and anyone who is thinking about improving research assessment where they work.

If you have ideas about what DORA can do to ensure that research and researchers are evaluated intelligently and fairly on their merits, please get in touch.

Here’s to the next five years!

Stephen Curry is a professor and assistant provost at Imperial College London. He is also the chair of the DORA steering committee.

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