This post summarizes discussions from DORA’s October 2026 Funder Community of Practice meetings, which explored the connections between responsible research assessment, scholarly communication, and open research information. Funders examined DORA’s forthcoming Practical Guide for Scholarly Communication and the Barcelona Declaration’s work on open funding metadata, highlighting the need for shared standards, interoperable infrastructure, and practical implementation support to enable fair, transparent, and inclusive research assessment.
The connections between Responsible Research Assessment (RRA), scholarly communication, open research infrastructure, and funding metadata are increasingly being recognized as central to robust and fair assessment. Together, they shape how research outputs are communicated, discovered, evaluated, and rewarded. At DORA’s October 01, 2026 Funder Group meetings, research funding organizations explored these interdependencies through discussions on DORA’s forthcoming Practical Guide for Implementing RRA in Scholarly Communication and the work of the Barcelona Declaration Funding Metadata Working Group. Funders unpacked key operational hurdles, debating shared technical tools, the need for interoperable standards, improve tracking of diverse outputs, and respect collective governance frameworks like Indigenous data sovereignty.
DORA’s Upcoming Practical Guide for Scholarly Communication
Following the release of DORA’s practical guidance for Research Performing Organizations (RPO Guide) and Research Funding Organizations (RFO Guide), DORA is developing a sister volume focused on Scholarly Communication (SC) actors. Many SC actors are actively engaging with research assessment, but they often use different terminology, operate under different incentives, and face distinct challenges when navigating a landscape crowded with declarations, recommendations, and reform initiatives. As with previous volumes, the Guide aims to support them to embed responsible assessment principles into their own policies, practices, technologies, and decision-making processes.
At the same time, the Guide recognizes that decisions made by SC actors have consequences far beyond their organizations, helping to shape the conditions that enable assessment reform by funders, institutions, and researchers. Because these systems are deeply interconnected, meaningful reform requires dialogue across organizational boundaries. This makes it important for funders to engage with developments in scholarly communication and to consider how changes in publishing practices, research information systems, and infrastructure can either support or hinder their own responsible research assessment goals.
Open Research Information: The Barcelona Declaration and Funding Metadata
If DORA’s presentation explored how scholarly communication shapes research assessment and vice-versa, the second examined the information infrastructure that makes responsible assessment possible. Bianca Kramer joined the Asia-Pacific meeting, and Hans de Jonge joined the Africa, Americas and Europe meeting to introduce the work of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, an international initiative that seeks to shift the research information ecosystem away from closed, proprietary information and the infrastructures it is contained in and toward open, transparent alternatives. The Declaration is organized around four commitments: making openness the default for research information, working with open systems and services, supporting sustainable infrastructure, and collectively driving the transition to open research information.
Although often invisible to researchers and policymakers, research information systems play a critical role in how research is tracked, evaluated, and rewarded. Kramer and de Jonge argued that responsible assessment reform cannot succeed if the underlying data and infrastructure remain opaque. When information about research activities, outputs, and funding flows is locked within proprietary systems, it becomes more difficult to identify biases, verify evidence, and build trust in evaluation processes.
The presentation focused particularly on the Declaration’s Working Group on Funding Metadata, which aims to improve the quality, completeness, and openness of information about research funding. The group’s work centers on two key components:
- Grant IDs: Persistent identifiers (PIDs) that uniquely identify funding awards.
- Funding acknowledgments in publication metadata: Structured information that links research outputs to specific funding sources and grant identifiers.
Together, these elements help connect funding inputs with research outputs, enabling greater transparency, improving impact tracking, and supporting more robust evidence for assessment and policy-making. To accelerate progress, the Working Group recently launched its Call to Action: Improving the Quality of Open Funding Metadata, which recommends that funders:
- Register persistent identifiers for grants;
- Share grant metadata openly through accessible APIs; and
- Consider requiring standardized funding acknowledgments as part of grant conditions.
Kramer and de Jonge also shared interim findings from an ongoing Funder Questionnaire, which has mapped readiness across 39 funding organizations in 27 countries. While respondents recognized the value of open funding metadata for transparency, monitoring, and impact tracking, many also reported significant implementation barriers. The most frequently cited challenges included limited staff capacity, competing organizational priorities, technical infrastructure constraints, and difficulties achieving data standardization across systems.
Moving toward shared guidance
The open discussions across both sessions surfaced shared systemic challenges, alongside regional and institutional perspectives on data standards, administrative overhead, and equity. Participants noted that progress will likely depend on more than individual organizational efforts. Shared technical tools, practical implementation guidance, common standards, and peer-learning opportunities were all identified as important enablers for adoption. This work also aligns with recommendations emerging from the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) and existing guidance developed for research funding organizations.
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Reducing burden & managing complexity
A central theme across the discussions was the acute operational pressure faced by many funding bodies. Often working with limited staff capacity while needing to demonstrate impact and value to governance boards, some funders expressed that adopting persistent identifiers (PIDs) and open metadata can at times feel overwhelming. Participants emphasized the benefits of a practical, step-by-step checklist or concrete implementation pathway. Rather than building bespoke tools, the system can benefit significantly from shared platforms and centralized community infrastructure that automatically link grant awards to public dashboards, minimizing administrative friction for both funders and awardees.
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Aligning standards with responsible assessment principles
Attendees highlighted a fundamental conceptual tension: establishing technical data standards and implementing responsible research assessment are distinct, multifaceted challenges. There is a risk that organizations might conflate technical data sharing with true RRA compliance. Funder guidance must clearly delineate how responsible assessment principles should govern what data is collected, monitored, and shared, ensuring that metadata collection does not inadvertently incentivize narrow or reductive metrics. Participants agreed that funders cannot solve these challenges in isolation; libraries, infrastructure providers, and publishers must actively collaborate to build shared, responsible solutions.
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Operational realities in policy and systems
Translating open science policies into practice reveals persistent gaps in infrastructure and data quality. While funders are expanding recognized compliance pathways, such as embracing preprints and integrating persistent identifiers to pre-fill grant application systems, ensuring metadata completeness and consistency remains a significant hurdle. Furthermore, upstream metadata supplied during manuscript submission often remains incomplete or irregular. Addressing these gaps requires moving away from manual data entry and toward offering automated validation checks (keeping humans in the loop), system-level interoperability, and modern infrastructure upgrades across both publishers and funding platforms.
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Equity, collective governance, and Indigenous Data Sovereignty
A critical point of reflection centered on the tension between standardized metadata models and Indigenous data sovereignty. While conventional persistent identifier systems are designed around individual attribution and track records, Indigenous research ethics and data sovereignty frameworks are rooted in collective ownership, shared stewardship, and community rights. Applying standardized metadata schemas universally without addressing collective governance risks reinforcing structural inequities. Participants emphasized that future guidance and exemplar workflows must actively engage with Indigenous data sovereignty to ensure open research systems remain inclusive and equitable.
What’s Next?
- DORA Scholarly Communication Guide: The project task force is synthesizing feedback from community events through November and December 2026, working toward a publication date of May 2027.
- Barcelona Declaration Conference: Join their hybrid international conference will take place in Berlin on November 24–25, 2026.
Reading List & Key Resources
- Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information: Website and Commitments
- Call to Action: Improving the Quality of Open Funding Metadata
We are incredibly grateful to all the funders who participated and shared their expertise. Your insights are vital to ensuring DORA’s next Practical Guide is based on the needs and experiences of the global research system.
If you are employed by a public or private research funder and are interested in joining the Funder Discussion Group, please find more information on our webpage or email us at info@sfdora.org.
Each quarter, DORA holds two Community of Practice (CoP) meetings for research funding organizations. One meeting takes place for organizations in the Asia-Pacific (AP) region and the other is for organizations in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (AAE). These groups provide a space for funders to learn from each other, share new policies and practices, and collaborate on advancing fair and responsible research assessment (RRA).