Following on from comments previous posts I just wanted to encourage anyone involved in research of any kind who hasn’t done so already to sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) as an individual and if your institution hasn’t done so yet please encourage them to do so. You can check whether your organization has signed it here.
The Number One recommendation of DORA is:
Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
You can read the other recommendations for funders, publishers, institutions, and researchers, here.
I am well aware that some institutions have signed DORA but don’t really pay attention to it in their internal processes. Maynooth University is a signatory and certainly does take it into consideration when dealing with, e.g., recruitment and promotion but it, along with other signatories, has to deal with inconsistencies in the outside world. One of these is that, while Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council are both signatories of DORA, the Irish Government itself is not, so the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science is not bound by it. That makes no sense to me at all!
