National Science Centre signs the DORA Declaration

Prof. Zbigniew Błocki, NCN Director, has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment – DORA, which relates to the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated, e.g. by funders, journals and research institutes.

The chief postulate of the declaration holds that research quality evaluation should rely on merit-based criteria rather than quantitative metrics. Its signatories argue that researchers should be judged primarily on the originality of their research and its impact on the development of the discipline, rather than on metrics such as, e.g. the Impact Factor. Merit-based criteria should be employed in decisions concerning both research funding and researchers’ promotion.

DORA includes a set of recommendations on specific researchers’ evaluation criteria, including some more general in scope and others targeted at individual stakeholder groups: funders, research institutes, research journal publishers, organizations that supply metrics and the researchers themselves.

The San Francisco declaration was drafted in December 2012 at a session of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) and originally signed by 78 organizations, including research-funding agencies, research and academic institutes, journals, research foundations and societies, as well as 154 researchers (including many Noble Prize winners) and other individuals affiliated with the academic world, e.g. editors-in-chief of prestigious research journals. Until today, the declaration has been signed by 580 organizations and nearly 13 thousand people from all over the world. Its Polish signatories also include the Foundation for Polish Science.

Read the declaration