UKRN has a key focus on rigour and transparency. Through the OR4 project and our membership of CoARA, our members support reforms to research assessment that should mean rigorous and transparent research is better recognised and rewarded, for example when people apply for jobs or for promotions. In line with both CoARA and DORA, we see that quantitative indicators can be used, with care and appropriately, to support these processes. However, those indicators themselves should be rigorous and transparent, which is one reason why UKRN was a founding signatory of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information.
The recent comment by Ginny Barbour and colleagues is a timely reminder of the potential harm done to users of platforms that innovate to promote research rigour and transparency, such as Biophysics Colab, eLife and MetaROR, and to the diversity of rigorous research, when those users and their research are excluded from mainstream indexing services. The piece also proposes action; that anyone using quantitative indicators for research assessment should adopt due diligence in the sources they use. The OR4 implementation guide provides guidance on how this due diligence can be put into practice and, as more and more members of the 53-strong OR4 community of institutions use the guide, we expect the impact of journal-level metrics rapidly to decline in research assessment. For example, see the statement from Leeds Beckett University: LBU Statement
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