Cambridge signs up to research assessment declaration

The University of Cambridge has said it is updating its recruitment and reward schemes after signing up to the San Francisco declaration on the responsible use of research metrics.

The university and Cambridge University Press announced on 9 July that they had become signatories of Dora, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment.

Originally drawn up in 2012, the declaration calls for institutions not to use journal-based metrics as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles. Universities should assess research on its own merits when making hiring and salary decisions, it states, rather than looking at where papers are published.