Project TARA

Responsible Research Assessment (RRA) Practical Guide for Research Performing Organizations (RPOs)

Project TARA (Tools to Advance Research Assessment) officially concluded in September 2025 after successfully achieving its core objectives to advance a global conversation on responsible research assessment.

We extend our deepest gratitude to Arcadia – a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage, and promote open access to knowledge – for their generous grant support that made this initiative possible. With Arcadia’s backing, we were able to systematically identify, understand, and make visible the criteria and standards universities use for hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions, and to translate these insights into actionable guidance for the global scholarly community.

Over the course of the project, DORA delivered several major resources to equip institutions with the tools needed to implement reform:

A central achievement was the January 2024 launch of Reformscape, a freely accessible online observatory that curates assessment policies, action plans, and practices from more than 200 institutions worldwide.

We also published an in-depth qualitative study on faculty assessment practices in the United States, which provides a critical benchmark of institutional attitudes toward reform.

Finally, Project TARA produced a highly utilized toolkit that began with resources to debias committees and recognize broader forms of scholarly impact, culminating in the May 2025 release of A Practical Guide to Implementing Responsible Research Assessment at Research Performing Organizations.

The Guide supports staff in planning and delivering new approaches, and is discipline-agnostic, flexible, and is intended to be adaptable to diverse organizational and disciplinary contexts by users. The guide emphasizes consultation, experimentation, monitoring, and iterative updates to assessment to meet the needs of a dynamic modern day research ecosystem. The guide has been co-developed especially with interest holders who met January 31, 2025 in Maryland, USA with the first release of the guide in May 2025.