What are DORA and CoARA?

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), launched in 2013 and signed by thousands of organisations and individuals, calls for an end to using journal-based metrics like impact factor to judge individual papers, people, or funding decisions. The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) is the broader, more recent European agreement that turns those principles into institutional reform commitments. Both rest on the same evidence base as the Leiden Manifesto, which sets out principles for metrics that support rather than distort judgement (Hicks et al. 2015). The gap they all point to is operational: institutions have committed to assess the work directly, but few have a scalable, consistent way to actually do it — most fall back on the very journal-and-citation signals the commitments reject. Article-level, blind, rubric-based evaluation is one concrete way to close that gap.