Royal Society signs up to DORA

The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).

This declaration challenges the role played by the Impact Factor as the main means for evaluating science and promotes the assessment of research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published.

For this reason, the Royal Society will, in future, present its journal Impact Factors within the context of a variety of journal-based metrics. Full details of current metrics can be found here.

Initiated by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals, DORA recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated. The group met in December 2012 during the ASCB Annual Meeting in San Francisco and subsequently circulated a draft declaration among various stakeholders. It is a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines.

Commenting on the Royal Society’s decision to sign, President, Sir Paul Nurse, said:

“The Royal Society believes that the Journal Impact Factor receives too much emphasis in research assessment processes worldwide. The Society fully supports the aims of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment.”