What is responsible research assessment?

Responsible research assessment is the principle that evaluation should reflect what research is and does, not where it was published. Its evidence base is the responsible-metrics literature: the Leiden Manifesto sets out ten principles — quantitative measures should support expert judgement, not replace it; indicators should be transparent, contestable, and matched to the goal of the assessment (Hicks et al. 2015). The Metric Tide review reached a similar conclusion for national systems, coining "responsible metrics" and cautioning against letting convenient numbers drive high-stakes decisions (Wilsdon et al. 2015). In practice this means article-level rather than journal-level judgement (DORA), criteria that are written down and open to challenge, and evaluation applied consistently across fields and seniority. Nabu is built to those constraints: a fixed, published rubric; blind scoring; every judgement traceable to the text, so it can be inspected and overruled rather than taken on faith.