The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) is a European coalition seeking to help develop and modernise research assessment. The ultimate aim is to improve the quality, efficiency and impact of research. The Knowledge Foundation is now one of the Swedish funding bodies that have chosen to sign up to the coalition at an early stage.
The Knowledge Foundation signs up and join CoARA
The initiative comes from the European Commission and is part of the ERA Policy Agenda for 2022–2024. Around 350 universities, financiers, academia and stakeholder organisations from 40 countries have been part of the process of developing the coalition so far.
There are no finished solutions yet, but the coalition will be building on sharing knowledge and experiences. The actors will work together to review principles and models for evaluating merit so that these steer towards the desired goals. Among other things, the assessment must value the quality of the research and its potential benefit, be transparent and respect the diversity between different fields of research. Each organisation decides for itself what it wants to do within the agreement but undertakes to report to the coalition after one year and after five years.
“Signing up to CoARA simply made sense for us. We think it will benefit research and contribute to greater utilisation and a more sustainable society. We want to move away from the closed system of expensive publication models and inappropriate use of the impact factors of journals,” says the Knowledge Foundation’s CEO Eva Schelin. “When it comes to new angles on assessing merit, we want to see and lobby for better incentives for research collaboration with society. This must especially include co-production between academia and the business sector, as this is a requirement we always make ourselves as a financier – and which we know helps to boost Sweden’s competitiveness.”