Effective February 2021, ACS Publications has signed the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). This demonstrates our commitment as a publisher and professional organization to support broader assessment of research output.
DORA recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. The declaration was developed in 2012 during the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco. It has become a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines and all key stakeholders including funders, publishers, professional societies, institutions, and researchers. DORA’s vision is to advance practical and robust approaches to research assessment globally and across all scholarly disciplines.
“The measurement and assessment of research is a challenge for the entire academic research community,” says Sybille Geisenheyner, Director of Open Science Strategy & Licensing at ACS. “Working together on how to assess the impact and quality of research is one of our main drivers in signing this declaration.”
ACS Publications is dedicated to making meaningful progress toward implementing the five DORA guidelines for publishers. We already fulfill a number of these recommendations, such as encouraging responsible authorship practices, and exploring a broader range of metrics to display the wider impact of articles published by ACS. Most recently, we made the reference list for all ACS Publications research articles open and available via CrossRef.