DORA announces new online tool to explore responsible academic career assessment 

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) announces the launch of Reformscape – a new online resource enabling the global academic community to explore and share examples of how to make hiring, promotion and tenure fairer, more robust and more diverse.

For years, the traditional way in which academic careers are assessed has been criticized as being unfair, biased and unfit for purpose.

An excessive focus on narrow criteria and publication metrics, with an overreliance on journal impact factors and quantity of output rather than the quality and diversity of research, has left talented people overlooked and held back progress in diversity, equity and inclusion.

Free to use through a user-friendly online portal, Reformscape is a rich, organized dataset bringing together hundreds of real-life examples showing how universities and other academic institutions around the world are bringing in fairer, more responsible and more informative approaches to academic career assessment.

Administrators, faculty and others in the academic community can explore Reformscape for ideas and inspiration around how to implement new approaches to career assessment and progression in their own institution, and also share their own policies and plans with the wider world. 

Reformscape has been developed as part of Project TARA (Tools to Advance Research Assessment) – a collaboration between Sarah de Rijcke, Alex Rushforth and Marta Sienkiewicz at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, Netherlands, Ruth Schmidt at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech, Stephen Curry at Imperial College London, and Anna Hatch, Haley Hazlett and Zen Faulkes at DORA. The project was co-created with members of the academic community and is supported by Arcadia, a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge.

Professor Stephen Curry (RoRI Director of Strategy) is the former chair of DORA who worked on the Project TARA team. He said: “DORA is very much a community effort to discover, develop and share solutions to the knotty problems of research assessment and this approach is very much at the heart of our new Reformscape tool. We are immensely proud of what we’ve achieved and excited to see how it will be used to foster the uptake of fairer and more robust career assessment in institutions across the world.”

Reformscape is free to use and can be accessed online at http://reformscape.org.