The research institutes at UHN signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). DORA is a set of recommendations developed in 2012 by a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco.
The declaration aims to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated, and it outlines general recommendations, as well as specific guidelines for funding agencies, institutions, publishers, researchers and organizations that supply metrics. One main recommendation is to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics—traditionally used by many—as surrogate measures of the quality of individual research articles in hiring, promotion or funding decisions.
Dr. Brad Wouters, Executive Vice President, Science and Research, signed DORA on Monday January 6, 2020 on behalf of the UHN Research Council Executive and research institutes. The commitment marks an important step in determining how research impact at UHN should be measured—one of the key initiatives towards the implementation of the UHN 2019–23 Strategic Research Plan. The research institutes will make a commitment to take more responsibility for evaluating their researchers’ works in a more holistic and transparent manner.
The research institutes at UHN now join more than 1,500 institutions worldwide as signatories of DORA. Other notable signatories include the following:
- Canadian funding agencies: Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC); Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI); Genome Canada
- Unity Health Toronto
- Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute
- University of Cambridge
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
- Stockholm University
- Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- American Association for the Advancement of Science