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Ruth Schmidt Leads International Coalition to Track Hiring and Promotion Criteria

Project Receives $1.2M Grant from Arcadia to Accelerate Research Assessment Reform

September 16, 2021

Arcadia: Promoting Open Access
Associate professor Ruth Schmidt will co-lead an effort to create a new dashboard that will track hiring and promotion criteria in academic institutions. The project with DORA seeks to promote equity in academia.

DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment) was recently awarded a $1.2 million grant from Arcadia to identify and publicize the criteria that universities around the world use to hire and promote researchers.

Though many in the scholarly community remain fixated on papers, books, and grants as the usual indicators of 'success,' there is growing consideration of how scholarly work reaches and impacts the wider world.
—DORA blog

Schmidt will work with a globally diverse team that includes Stephen Curry, the Chair of DORA and Imperial College’s Assistant Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; Sarah de Rijcke, Professor in Science and Evaluation Studies and Director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University; and other DORA leaders and Leiden University researchers to create:

 

  • An interactive online dashboard that will track the criteria that academic institutions use for hiring, review, promotion, and tenure.
  • A survey of attitudes and approaches to research assessment reform across US academic institutions.
  • A toolkit of resources to support academic institutions working to improve policy and practice.

DORA facilitates the implementation of good practice in research assessment.

Specifically, Chris Woolston at Nature writes, “It calls for doing away with impact factors as a way to judge the merit of academics.”

DORA has been signed by more than 20,000 individuals and institutions around the world.

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