DORA — San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
Overview
DORA is an international declaration calling on research funders, institutions, and publishers to reform how researchers and their work are assessed. Its central argument is that journal-level metrics such as the Impact Factor are poor and distorting proxies for the quality of individual research outputs, and should not be used in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions. Assessment should instead be based on the intrinsic merit of the work itself, including its rigour, openness, and broader contribution. DORA is relevant to open science because Impact Factor-driven assessment actively discourages open practices: researchers are incentivised to publish in high-prestige subscription journals rather than sharing data, methods, and preprints openly. By shifting assessment criteria toward research quality and open science behaviours, DORA creates institutional conditions in which open sharing is recognised and rewarded. The declaration was drafted in 2012 by journal editors and publishers at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco and has since gathered over 25,000 individual and institutional signatories worldwide as of May 2024. The CoARA reform agreement operationalises DORA principles across European institutions through a formal commitment mechanism.
Connections
- Endorsed by: EC Open Science Policy