Annual meeting of the French chapter of the Coalition for the Advancement of Research Assessment (CoARA)

The French chapter of CoARA (Coalition for the Advancement of Research Assessment) met on May 6th at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research for its 2nd annual plenary session.

This French chapter of CoARA was set up in October 2023 and now brings together 60 French organisations (mainly universities, research organisations, agencies, grandes écoles and associations) around 10 commitments to help shift research evaluation towards an increased recognition of the diversity of researchers’ achievements, activities and career paths and towards more qualitative evaluation criteria.

The international CoARA initiative has more than 700 signatory organisations and 17 other connected national chapters. In this framework, the French chapter’s aim is to act as a support network for the implementation of CoARA principles in French institutions and organisations and also as a forum for sharing experiences, resources and ideas on how research evaluation should develop.^[1]The international initiative CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) was launched at the end of 2022, following on from the Paris Call on Research Assessment. This call was presented by the Open Science Committee at the Paris Open Science European Conference (OSEC 2022) and inspired the conclusions of the Council of the European Union on research assessment and open science. The call proposed that evaluation should be reformed to promote a qualitative overall peer assessment of individuals, groups and projects.

On May 6th, Erszebet Thot-Czifra (European Science Foundation, CoARA) gave attendees an update on CoARA and presented the initial results of the international working groups (https://coara.eu/news/). They were invited to reflect on the recognition of reviewing activities by a presentation by Johan Rooryck (the President of COAlition S), as well as on the issues surrounding research reproducibility and the consideration of such issues in research evaluation through the presentation by Sarah Cohen Boulakia, (professor at the University of Paris-Saclay and member of the French Network for Reproducible Research).

The afternoon was taken up with workshops designed to help research organisations draw up their CoARA action plan (workshop led by Caroline Gaucher), identify the needs and actions required to drive progress on the specific disciplinary features of research practices and products (led by Françoise Genova), facilitate effective communication on CoARA (led by Marion Cipriano) and agree on the key elements that need to be included in an ‘assessor’s guide’ (led by Fabien Borget).

Find out more: www.coara.fr

If you’d like to join the national chapter please contact: Fabien Borget (fabien.borget@univ-amu.fr) and Marion Cipriano (marion.cipriano@inserm.fr)