Reflections: DORA Five Years Later

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) recently announced their formal endorsement of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) in hopes that their action will encourage others to acknowledge the need to improve research assessment practices. While I read this announcement with interest, I also wondered: What’s been happening with DORA? Has DORA had any impact in the research community? Has any progress been made?

DORA began as a conversation during a meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology that took place in 2012 in San Francisco. Journal editors, researchers, as well as, other interested individuals came together to discuss the output and results of scientific research with the desire to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics (e.g. Impact Factor).  There were two other themes or recommendations made – the need to assess research on its own merits; and the need to capitalize on the opportunities provided by web-based publications (use and leverage other research impact indicators, such as, Altmetrics/online attention metrics). In June 2013, I published a blog about this initiative, entitled “Evaluating Scientific Research: Recommendations from DORA” and noted that organizers had obtained signatures from 310 organizations and 8,106 individuals — all willing to acknowledge and support this declaration.

Today, this cross-disciplinary, global initiative continues to seek improvement in the ways in which scholarly research outputs are evaluated, now with the backing of 446 organizations and over 11,000 individuals.  The list of DORA signers is impressive and includes: BioMed Central and SpringerOpen, Cancer Research UK, Center for Open Science, The Company of Biologists, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, eLife, F1000Public Library of Science (PLoS), The University of Kansas Cancer Center, and Wellcome Trust.

The DORA website has been re-designed with a new logo, look and feel and they have engaged a DORA Community Manager.  The core recommendations outlined in DORA remain fundamentally the same, however, they have been organized by target audience (funding agencies, institutions, publishers, organizations that supply metrics, and researchers) to highlight efforts each group should consider.  Looking to the future, how will DORA supporters take action? How will each segmented group advance the recommendations within their sphere? And how will each group integrate these recommendations into the scholarly communication ecosystem as a whole?

If DORA has peaked your interested and you are curious about staying in the know about their future plans, try following them on Twitter — their handle is @DORAssessment.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services