CoARA, 18 months into existence
A fully operational CoARA
In its first 18 months, CoARA has grown to 646 members and 735 signatories across 50 countries worldwide. The coalition’s operational basics now established, including the initial wave of Working Groups and National Chapters, from this year onward the focus has more been set on enhancing internal exchanges within the coalition.
The next implementation challenge is to streamline the efforts of the diverse actor groups contributing to CoARA and to provide coalition members with an at-a-glance perspective of the rich array of activities and outputs from National Chapters, Working Groups, action plans, and the CoARA Boost project.
Find out more about the latest dvelopments of CoARA’s Working Groups and National Chapters!
Action plans to address the shared commitments
Moving forward from agreement to action and actual implementation of CoARA. In 2024, we began to see a momentum around action plans. An increasing number of CoARA member organisations are developing processes and tools to address the shared commitments of the Agreement.
- Browse the collection of submitted Action Plans in CoARA’s Zenodo community.
- Watch the replay of our recent webinar dedicated to Action Plans.
The General Assembly provided a preliminary overview of the ongoing analysis of submitted Action Plans, currently performed within the EU-funded CoARA Boost project and led by the CNRS. Results of their work will be released as open research data.
Update of CoARA’s Rules of Procedure for Chair, Vice-Chair(s), and Steering Board
Adding geographical balancing to the Steering Board election criteria.
The latter part of the General Assembly resulted in a vote by member representatives on an update of CoARA’s Rules of Procedure Chair, Vice-Chair(s) and Steering Board, with regard to adding geographical balancing to the Steering Board election criteria.
Fostering diversity and inclusiveness of stakeholders in research processes and addressing long-standing structural inequalities is a key value in the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA). Promoting broad, balanced and inclusive representation of its membership and stakeholder communities is not only a core precondition of a truly systemic reform but it must also be reflected in CoARA’s governance. To ensure that the composition of the Steering Board accurately reflects the diversity of actors involved in the reform of research assessment, CoARA has a set of balancing criteria in place when selecting members of the Steering Board.
Following the first two elections, in 2024, the Steering Board and the CoARA Secretariat agreed that adding a geographical criterion to the balancing was necessary to ensure all regions within the coalition are represented and feel welcome, to limit overrepresentation of certain geographical areas, as well as to accelerate the reform on a global level and in partnership with leaders outside of Europe. These critera will evolve along the evolution of CoARA.
Next General Assembly
Detailed minutes of this General Assembly are currently in preparation and will be circulated in time for the next General Assembly meeting, to be held on 9 December 2024, online.
Save the date!
The presentations are available for download here. Many thanks to all representative members for their active participation!