DORA is delighted to announce the launch of Reformscape—a new online resource enabling the global academic community to explore and share examples of how to make hiring, promotion, and tenure fairer, more robust, and more diverse.
For years, the traditional way in which academic careers are assessed has been criticized for relying too much on journal impact factors, leaving talented people overlooked and holding back progress.
Free to use through a user-friendly online portal, Reformscape is a rich, organized dataset populated with policies, action plans, and other documents from more than 200 institutions from all over the world.
The academic community can explore Reformscape for ideas and inspiration around how to implement new approaches to career assessment and progression in their own institution, and share their policies and plans. For example:
- Read institutional profiles describing detailed summaries of their actions and progress.
- Access source materials to dig into the details of announcements, action plans, policies, and published practices.
- Search and filter examples by location, career stage, discipline, and date.
- Share institutional profiles and insights with your networks to spark conversations and celebrate progress.
- Keep up to date with new materials added over time by using meta tags as well as the latest insights shared by the DORA team.
Reformscape was developed as part of Project TARA (Tools to Advance Research Assessment). The project was co-created with members of the academic community and is supported by Arcadia, a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage, and promote open access to knowledge.
Professor Stephen Curry is the former chair of DORA who worked on the Project TARA team. He said, “DORA is very much a community effort to discover, develop, and share solutions to the knotty problems of research assessment and this approach is very much at the heart of our new Reformscape tool. We are immensely proud of what we’ve achieved and excited to see how it will be used to foster the uptake of fairer and more robust career assessment in institutions across the world.”
Sarah de Rijcke, Professor of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at Leiden University, said, “Reformscape is a significant step in evolving the way we assess academic careers. Its launch is an encouraging development towards more equitable and inclusive academic evaluations. I’m hopeful about the potential impact of this tool, especially in expanding our perspective on academic achievements beyond conventional measures. I’m keen to see how it grows to include more institutions and diverse career stages, offering a more nuanced view of academic merit.”
Reformscape is free to use and can be accessed online at http://reformscape.org.
