Policy landscape
Research Assessment Reforms
The international reform movement this registry builds on — each initiative's core philosophy and its specific relevance to recognising non-traditional outputs. This list is non-exhaustive: it highlights efforts most relevant to the Life Sciences and this work, included here for context on the wider international and global reform movement.
| Initiative | Year | Core philosophy | Relevance to non-traditional outputs |
|---|---|---|---|
| DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) | 2013 | Eliminate the use of journal-based metrics (e.g., Journal Impact Factor) for funding, appointment, and promotion decisions. | Shifts the assessment focus from where work is published to the intrinsic quality of the research itself, opening the door for assessing diverse outputs like software and data on their own merit. |
| Leiden Manifesto | 2015 | Ten principles to guide the responsible use of bibliometrics and prevent the abuse of quantitative indicators. | Emphasizes that quantitative metrics must support (not replace) qualitative expert assessment and must respect the specific nature of different research fields (e.g., computational biology vs. clinical medicine). |
| Hong Kong Principles | 2020 | Fosters research integrity by assessing responsible research practices rather than just publication counts. | Explicitly calls for rewarding Open Science practices, including the complete reporting of methods and the sharing of reliable data, software, code, and protocols (Principle 4). |
| Hidden REF | 2020 | A grassroots competition and campaign designed to celebrate all research outputs and the diverse people (technicians, dRTPs, and librarians) who make research possible. | Provides a practical framework for recognizing Non-Traditionally Submitted Outputs (NTOs), such as code, datasets, and exhibitions which are essential to the research ecosystem but ignored by traditional REF metrics. |
| CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) | 2022 | A global coalition of organisations committing to systemic reform of research assessment based on qualitative judgement. | The agreement includes specific commitments to recognize the "diversity of contributions to, and careers in, research," providing a direct policy mandate for supporting dRTP roles and their outputs. |
| United Nations Open Source Principles | 2025 | A set of eight guidelines from the United Nations forming global principles to support and promote Open Source across and beyond the UN system. | Provides an international policy mandate for open software NTO production, with Principle 7 — "RISE (recognize, incentivize, support, empower)" — dedicated to empowering individuals and communities to actively participate, and so to crediting the people behind those outputs. |
| OPUS RAF (Researcher Assessment Framework) | 2026 | Moves researcher evaluation away from traditional metrics by defining, incentivizing, and rewarding the implementation of Open Science practices across institutions. | Integrates processes, outputs, and outcomes within a single framework, recognizing diverse outputs — including data, software, educational materials, and open peer review reports — as formal evaluation criteria, ensuring researchers are rewarded for generating transparent and reproducible NTOs. |
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