Do you know DORA?

The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), also known as Declaration of San Francisco is a public statement to improve the ways research is assessed to be used in promotions, hiring and grant funding. The full declaration can be found here. In short, the declaration urges us to evaluate research on its own merits and not taking care of things like the Impact Factor of magazines in which they are published. Although in no point the declaration tells against the use of quantitative metrics to evaluate published articles, it is obvious it advocated the use of qualitative metrics.

From the original declarations we read the following recommendations:

• the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, in funding, appointment, and promotion considerations;
• the need to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published; and
• the need to capitalize on the opportunities provided by online publication (such as relaxing unnecessary limits on the number of words, figures, and references in articles, and exploring new indicators of significance and impact).

It is clear that the declaration was designed to find an evaluation culture which has been fostered by some publishers, in which the researcher, in special the young researcher, is urged to publish articles in high impact factor magazines, otherwise they would not succeed. Worse than that university and grant agency authorities, perhaps due to lazyness, adopted the same culture in their evaluations. Criteria like the already mentioned impact factor, the infamous "paper counting" and the h-factor dominate this kind of evaluation. The DORA is a cry for help to avoid this kind of thing.

The DORA can be signed individually, or adhered to by institutions. The USP - Universidade de S?o Paulo formally signed the declaration and institutional evaluation chamber (CAI), to which I am the vice-president, is active in discussing and applying the DORA in our evaluation processes. Recently we realized we have to discuss these implications with all the community.

To illustrate the appropriateness of the DORA, I'm using the article which was primarily written by Prof. Dr. Matheus Araujo Tunes (he stubbornly resists in creating an account here at LinkedIn), but I was, together with my friend Prof. Milos Djukic (University of Belgrade), co-author. We both recognize the high quality of the content. Prof. Tunes, however, is worried because he thinks the impact factor of this magazine. I have been trying to convince him that the article has its own merits and that it will have a large impact in the field. The proof is that the article was chosen to illustrate the back cover of the issue in which it is published, and this is the image I used to illustrate this article.

I sincerely hope that the academic community will fully adhere to the DORA. Qualitative evaluation is hard to do, but it is our job at the University to do thing rationally.