The Érudit Consortium is proud to join the 2,300 organizations and 18,000 individuals who have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). In Canada, 39 organizations are signatories (in January 2022), including the Fonds de recherche du Québec and the three Canadian research councils, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries.
DORA Declaration
The Declaration, drafted in 2012 at the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual meeting, calls for improved methods for evaluating researchers and the results of scientific research by the various stakeholders of scholarly publishing (funding agencies, educational and research institutions, publishers, etc.). This is a global initiative that affects all scientific research disciplines and whose primary goal is to encourage the development and promotion of best practices in the evaluation of researchers and scholarly research.
Ten years after its drafting, Érudit reaffirms the importance of this Declaration. The DORA Declaration remains as relevant as ever, if not more so. “In signing the DORA Declaration, we would like to highlight an initiative that contributes to a more equitable and inclusive research ecosystem, but also to underline the major role that national journals play in the dissemination of research results, particularly in the humanities and social sciences,” says Vincent Larivière, Professor at the Université de Montréal and Scientific Director of Érudit.
Impact factor
DORA recognizes the primary role of the scholarly article in the dissemination of knowledge, and aims to enhance the value of all types of scholarly publications. One of DORA’s main criticisms concerns the importance given to the impact factor in the evaluation of research and reminds us that the impact factor was created to help librarians select documentary resources and not to evaluate the scientific quality of research published in the form of an article. The impact factor is based on the specific characteristics of a limited number of disciplines, including the natural and medical sciences. Furthermore, it does not take into account use by communities that publish little or not at all, and that do not cite literature: college or undergraduate students, professionals or citizens without a direct link to scientific research. To learn about the goals and projects related to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment or to view the project roadmap, we invite you to visit the DORA website.
To learn more about the impact factor, its criticisms and alternatives, we invite you to consult the note that the Érudit research team has produced : Scholarly Impact Metrics.
Contact :
Gwendal Henry, Communication Officer
gwendal.henry@erudit.org
About Érudit
Érudit is an inter-university consortium formed by the Université de Montréal, Université Laval and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Through a wide range of services, from data tagging to document indexing for international content aggregators, the Érudit team has been supporting the research and cultural communities in digital publishing and dissemination for over 20 years. The erudit.org platform distributes over 220 French, English and bilingual scientific and cultural journals. Each year, more than 5 million users consult the corpus, spread throughout the world.