Objectives
TARA aims to accelerate research assessment reform through:
Systematic review of new or innovative research assessment policies and practices at academic institutions, primarily in the United States and Europe
Analysis & assessment of new or innovative research assessment policies and practices in the form of an interactive online dashboard to track criteria and standards for academic advancement
Development and testing of tools and resources to help institutions move forward with new policies and practices to improve research assessment in the United States and Europe
Team
Project TARA is a collaboration between the DORA team, CWTS (Sarah de Rijcke & Alex Rushforth), and Ruth Schmidt, Associate Professor at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
The grant for Project TARA will help the team to identify, understand, and make visible the criteria and standards universities use to make hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. This information will be used to create resources and practical guidance on the reform of research assessment for academic and scholarly institutions. The grant will provide crucial support to create the following outputs:
- An interactive online dashboard that tracks criteria and standards academic institutions use for hiring, review, promotion, and tenure.
- A survey of U.S. academic institutions to gain a broad understanding of institutional attitudes and approaches to research assessment reform.
- A toolkit of resources informed by the academic community to support academic institutions working to improve policy and practice.
CWTS is responsible for:
developing and conducting a survey of U.S. academic institutions to gain a broad understanding of institutional attitudes and approaches to research assessment reform; analyzing the survey response data; publishing survey results, and developing a mechanism to identify policies and practices from the survey responses to populate the dashboard; provide input into the development of the dashboard, identify relevant source material for the dashboard, identify new materials for the dashboard from the survey data, create a list of relevant data for dashboard capture and display; provide input into the development of the toolkit resources.
Website
Duration
The grant period begins on June 1, 2021 and ends on May 31, 2022. The project is funded by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin.
Keywords
Research assessment reform
Partners
DORA (Stephen Curry, Anna Hatch, Haley Hazlett)
Ruth Schmidt, Associate Professor at the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology
CWTS Staff
Sarah de Rijcke, Alexander Rushforth