10 years since the advent of DORA: Emerald's commitment and contribution to date
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Greater focus on the value and influence of research outputs is needed if the research publishing sector is to improve the evaluation of research.
This is why Emerald, and many other organisations and individuals are signatories of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) – to develop and promote best practice in the assessment of scholarly research worldwide.
On DORA’s 10th anniversary (May 2023), we are reflecting on what our actions have been so far and the responsibility we have as a publisher to help drive change.
While there’s still much more we can and will be doing, the below infographic outlines our progress against DORAs recommendations, along with a number of initiatives and resources that reinforce our commitment to real impact.
Our actions against DORA's 10 recommendations
Over the past few years we have been working hard to help improve how research is assessed. Here you can see some of the actions we have taken against DORA's recommendations.
Our actions against DORA’s 10 recommendations to help improve how research is assessed.
2019 - 2023
1. Cease the promotion of journal impact factors.
- Promotional activity, such as press releases, are no longer sent when citation reports are released.
2. Provide article metrics and indicators.
- The Altmetric badge has been deployed at article level on Emerald Insight for all Emerald journals, where data is available.
- All journal articles published on Emerald Insight display a download count.
- We recognise and reward high-quality scholarly research via our Literati Awards.
- Each journal homepage features a range of relevant indexing and metric information (See example).
3. Adopt the CRediT taxonomy for author contributions.
- Working towards adopting the CRediT taxonomy.
4. Ensure that all reference data deposited with Crossref is open.
- Our abstracts are freely accessible and distributed via Crossref.
- We are a member of the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) formalising our support for openness of abstracts.
5&6. Require authors to make all key data available according to FAIR principles and follow the data citation principles.
- We encourage authors to share data via our open data policy, but this is not mandated.
7. Encourage the use of unique identifiers (eg RRIDs).
- Working towards the use of unique identifiers.
8. Require authors to use ORCIDs.
- We are a member organisation of ORCID and encourage the submitting author to complete their submission using an ORCID ID (the only exception being Emerald’s Health & Social Care Journals, which are practitioner publications).
9. Publish peer review reports and author responses along with the article.
- Working towards publishing peer review reports and author responses with articles.
10. Examine ways to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the publishing process.
- Founding signatory and member of the SDG Publishers Compact.
- Taken steps to meet our ambition of achieving equal representation across all publishing practices by 2030.
- Reviewed our books proposal form to include inclusion-orientated questions.
- Established an Indigenous Peoples Advisory Panel to support and advise on our mission to promote Indigenous voices.
- Working with the Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity within Publishing, and have added new questions to collect gender, race and ethnicity data within ScholarOne.
Internal action
- Embedded accountability and ownership by employing an Inclusion Lead to action our plans for diversity, inclusion and accessibility.
- Improved recruitment practices and processes across the business to ensure relevant actions against SDGs 5, 8 and 10 remain consistent, fair, and reflect the needs of our colleagues and customer communities.
Supporting research impact
Impact Services
Impact services has been developed to help researchers and institutions better understand and tackle impact, offering the tools, learning materials and support to ensure research can lead to positive change.
Impact Advisory Board
Our Impact Advisory Board is a collaborative, supportive network, where together we explore shared challenges, discuss changes in the Higher Education landscape, and where applicable respond to them, challenge them and champion change. The Board includes representatives from all areas of the research community, who contribute their understanding and perspectives to foster diverse and varying discussions on the impact debate.
We share the same ambitions as our communities for the value of research and its impact on society, this is why we were one of the first publishers to sign DORA. The declaration has certainly had an impact on the reform of research assessment. It is appropriate that we all recognise how far we have come by working together across the research and publishing ecosystem, in celebrating what DORA set out to achieve, but also what more still needs to be done. Through various initiatives Emerald remains committed to co-creating a fairer and more inclusive environment for the research communities we all serve, and society more broadly.
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