Open Access Week

Lunch and Learn Session 1: DORA, the Declaration on Research Assessment
Introduction by Prof. Ravi Samtaney
Date and Time: Tuesday, October 26, 12:00-13:00

Lunch and learn sessions will be held in the circular seating area on the Seaview side on level 2 of the University Library. A light lunch will be provided for participants. No registration is required.

The idea for DORA originated at a meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco in 2012, in part to address the misuse of, and overreliance on, the journal impact factor to judge research quality. Since then over 20,000 individuals and institutions have signed it and DORA has become the basis for a global initiative “to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated”. 

Read the full declaration at: https://sfdora.org/read/  

Published as a comment in Nature in 2015, the Leiden Manifesto offers guidance on how to appropriately apply metrics in research evaluation. 

The ten principles of the Leiden Manifesto are as follows: 

1. Quantitative evaluation should support qualitative, expert assessment. 

2. Measure performance against the research missions of the institution, group, or researcher. 

3. Protect excellence in locally relevant research. 

4. Keep data collection and analytical processes open, transparent, and simple. 

5. Allow those evaluated to verify data and analysis. 

6. Account for variation by field in publication and citation practices. 

7. Base assessment of individual researchers on a qualitative judgement of their portfolio. 

8. Avoid misplaced concreteness and false precision. 

9. Recognize the systemic effects of assessment and indicators. 

10. Scrutinize indicators regularly and update them. 

Learn more at: http://www.leidenmanifesto.org/  

• What is motivating new initiatives around improving research assessment? 

• How are approaches to assessing research quality actually changing? 

• How can different approaches to thinking about research metrics and research quality affect how a researcher’s career develops?