This article is the first in a planned series on the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). We will be exploring the importance of its principles, their alignment with MRU values, and how its guidance can support our efforts, while also examining what committing to DORA means for the MRU community in striving towards these goals.
"Sketch of Sharing Knowledge and Lessons Learned" by Lucia Obst (WMDE), is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
DORA brings together resources, ideas, and practices that strengthen research assessment practices, advocating for a shift away from traditional metrics for assessing individual research efforts, such as the flawed focus on journal impact factor, toward recognizing the actual contributions and societal impacts of research.
Over 3,300 organizations have committed to DORA globally, including 60+ Canadian organizations such as the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the universities of Montreal, Calgary and Victoria, and major funders like NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR, Genome Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and many more. This reflects a national shift toward more inclusive metrics and assessment that better capture the quality and impact of Canadian research.
With International Open Access Week recently behind us, we’ve been reflecting on the many connections between open access (OA) and DORA. Researchers, writers, and peer reviewers advance knowledge, often funded by public dollars, yet much of that work remains locked behind paywalls—limiting access to quality information for other researchers, policymakers, educators, and the public.
Together, open access and DORA foster a system where research has greater impact. For Mount Royal researchers and community, this raises key questions:
How much further could our work go if it were accessible to everyone?
How can we maximize the reach of our work if access is restricted?
How can we increase access in ways that are both effective and sustainable?
The Declaration on Research Assessment expands the conversation about reforming how research is evaluated and/while OA publishing supports this shift, making research freely available, increasing both visibility and impact. Together, DORA and OA publishing create a more inclusive and equitable research environment and broaden dissemination of knowledge.
Canada's federal funders are reviewing the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications to ensure peer-reviewed publications from publicly funded research are freely available at the time of publication, with updates expected by the end of 2025. This step will make Canadian research more accessible globally. We expect that the updated policy will still require funded authors to publish open access versions of their works. MRU has long valued evaluating research based on its real-world contributions, and together we are engaging in conversations to reaffirm this commitment and to ensure our institution aligns with the goals of both OA and DORA.
Online publication offers opportunities unavailable to print publication, such as adopting diverse formats, greater accessibility, enhanced global reach, and access equity. Open access publishing pushes this development further by making research outputs freely accessible to everyone, treating them as a public good. Open access puts impactful research into the hands of information users faster and in more formats than traditional publications. By sharing open scholarship outputs like datasets, computing code, and educational resources, OA drives innovation, entrepreneurship, and societal improvements. DORA itself calls us to “capitalize on the opportunities provided by online publication,” and OA helps us meet this challenge.
This means the MRU community needs to have frank, ongoing discussion about the merits (and flaws) of OA publishing. For example, OA journals are still frequently perceived as being of lower quality when compared to most traditional subscription journals, despite the evidence showing how legitimate open scholarly publications have highly impactful real-world benefits (e.g., Besançon et al, 2021). Open publishing can increase audience perceptions of research trustworthiness, including by public audiences (Song et al., 2022) who recognize open science is a public good, and ideally counteract the current climate of fake news and misinformation. While traditional research impact assessment has focused only on citation metrics, OA articles are viewed, downloaded, and cited more often than subscription resources (White et al., 2024), and when taken together these measures provide a more wholistic picture of a publication’s research impact, and demonstrate that open publications have reach extending further than their subscription counterparts. Focusing on what the research tells us, rather than on the journal where the research appears, will broaden the appeal of open access while meeting DORA refinements. And since OA publications are nearly always online-only (or at least online first), they can go beyond the limitations of print, incorporating interactive elements and multimedia, while avoiding publishing barriers such as fees for page counts or colour images.
Open publishing and open scholarship foster transparency, reduce barriers, and address inequities in access and inclusion. By emphasising the content and value of the work, rather than where it was published, processes like merit review, tenure and promotion decisions, and awards and grant evaluations are democratised. This approach also encourages thoughtful conversations on properly crediting all project contributors – not just authors – supported by tools like the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRedit) being adopted by publishers, funders, and institutions.
Discussions around research impact assessment, the DORA principles, and open access present opportunities to strengthen those activities where scholarship assessment is part of the process.
For the institution, this means:
Investing in resources, education, and infrastructure that support open scholarship initiatives;
Codifying open access as a valued publication model in research assessment practices.
For researchers, this means:
Prioritising open publishing, including contributing versions of your work to an open repository.
Exploring alternative, open forms of research dissemination such as datasets, digital archives, infographics, policy briefs, podcasts, webinars, preprints, and educational resources, and promoting those as complementary contributions to your overall research portfolio.
For MRU as a community, this means:
Promoting a shared commitment to open access values and principles as a cornerstone of equitable and impactful research.
We look forward to participating as Mount Royal engages in the important conversations about sustainable and ethical research dissemination. We can reflect on what this means for us, explore opportunities to adopt and refine our practices, and work together to develop a shared understanding of open access and equitable research assessment.
The DORA Movement in Canada: Working Together to Advance Assessment of Research Excellence
Library Open at MRU resources
Besançon, L., Peiffer-Smadja, N., Segalas, C., Jiang, H., Masuzzo, P., Smout, C., Billy, E., Deforet, M., & Leyrat, C. (2021). Open science saves lives: Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 21(1), 117-117. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-021-01304-y
Song, H., Markowitz, D. M., & Taylor, S. H. (2022). Trusting on the shoulders of open giants? Open science increases trust in science for the public and academics. Journal of Communication, 72(4), 497–510. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqac017
White, N., Mein, L., Neubeiser, K., Peck, L., Junge, K., Eassom, H, & Debiec-Waszak, A. (2024). Demonstrating the advantage of publishing open access with Wiley [White paper]. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/network/publishing/research-publishing/open-access/demonstrating-the-advantage-of-publishing-open-access-with-wiley
Contributors:
Richard Hayman is Associate Professor and Digital Initiatives Librarian with the MRU Library and is a local expert for open access. He is the current administrator of the Library OA Fund and the Library’s OA ejournal publishing program, sits on two national groups promoting open publishing, and has research and professional interests that include scholarly communications, educational technologies, and evidence-based practice. All of his scholarly publications are available via open access.
Francine May is an Associate Professor with the MRU Library and currently serves as Associate Dean responsible for collections and research. She oversees the library's strategic approach to collections, including supporting open access through resource selection, budget allocation, and initiatives that promote equitable access to scholarly materials. Francine's professional interests include scholarly communication, library budgeting, and the intersection of collections and research.
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