Abstract

The landscape of research assessment is changing, with the introduction of DORA and lately CoARA, where a more robust and fair assessment practices are being promoted. Funders are also adopting new narrative-based CVs to further the fair assessment. This changes the demands of the Research managers and administrators, as the ‘usual’ workflows need to adopt these new assessment practices. CoARA provides a set of principles and commitments where signatories are agreeing to adopt these principles which focuses a fair assessment that supports diversity and quality of the research by having a strong emphasis on using a qualitative approach in the evaluation with support of responsible use of quantitative metrics.
Researcher managers and administrators should be supported in this transition, and this requires RIMS and CRIS system to adapt and support new ways of working with research assessment.
This presentation explores the principles and commitments of CoARA as well as the narrative CV approach, as defined by The Royal Society’s Résumé for Researchers, and how a CRIS should facility the gathering and creation of such a CV and the processes.
This presentation highlights some of the challenges that research managers and administrators are facing when dealing with various requirements of funders and assessments and getting researcher to provide the needed information and how a CRIS could support them by making the information easily available to the relevant stakeholders. As an example, one of the commitments of CoARA states:
Base research assessment primarily on qualitative evaluation for which peer review is central, supported by responsible use of quantitative indicators
A CRIS should support the review process for the assessment, and it should be possible to carefully select the metrics that supports the review. It should also be possible to explain which metrics are being used, to ensure that the process is transparent.
It can be a real challenge for research managers to gather the information needed to a qualitative assessment, and to manage the peer review process, and not to just use the available journal metrics as an indicator of the quality of the research. Here the CRIS system should support the research managers in collecting information, and potentially running the peer review, making it easy for the reviews to complete the review.