In November 2022, DARIAH became a founding member of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). The coalition brings together more than 350 research, infrastructure and policy organisations from over 40 countries who join forces to implement the very timely reform of research assessment across Europe.
“A research infrastructure is not a research-performing organisation, but the success of a research infrastructure depends in part on the buy-in from the research-performing individuals and organisations,” said Dr. Toma Tasovac, President of the DARIAH Board of Directors. “That’s why solidifying evaluation frameworks around diverse born-digital scholarly outputs is of great strategic importance for DARIAH. To put it bluntly: you can’t build and maintain a digital research infrastructure in the long term unless your contributors get academic credit for the infrastructural work they do. CoARA is potentially a game-changer in this respect, and we’re very happy to be part of it.”
Having already contributed to the preparatory phase of CoARA and its Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, DARIAH will continue to to bring domain-specific perspectives to the reform in order to optimise the mechanisms for evaluating arts and humanities scholars across Europe and beyond.
“The currently dominant recognition criteria, such as citation counts and the publishers’ prestige, have ceased to accurately reflect what we most value in, and need from, research,” said DARIAH Open Science Officer, Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra. “Scholars deserve to receive credit for the many contributions they make above and beyond the research paper or a published monograph. Developing research tools or optimising them for different languages, creating digital editions, data publications, training materials, exhibitions, interactive visualisations, these kinds of activities provide vital contributions to arts and humanities scholarship, but are often ignored by traditional assessment frameworks”.
To give a richer context to the ongoing work and initiate a discussion on it with our community, DARIAH has also launched a blog post series on DARIAH Open to share the latest updates about the reform and to bring together a diverse range of expert opinions from the social sciences and humanities domain. The posts below are direct reflections of the Agreement. The series will continue in 2023, stay tuned!
- Blog post introducing the Agreement: https://dariahopen.hypotheses.org/1493
- Guest post by Samuel Moore revisiting the research assessment reform in the light of the job market in academia: https://dariahopen.hypotheses.org/1527
- Guest post by Emanuel Kulczycki on how the Agreement could better accommodate and highlight the essentially multilingual nature of research: https://dariahopen.hypotheses.org/1582
- Guest post by Ioana Galleron on how the ongoing reform serves an opportunity to close the evaluation gap between the current research assessment proxies and the epistemic cultures of Social Sciences and Humanities https://dariahopen.hypotheses.org/1630
Further information about CoARA and its already published resources can be found on their website: https://coara.eu/all-resources/
If you’re interested in learning more about DARIAH’s commitments to the research assessment reform, check out our blog post or its visual summary.
