DORA

Promoting better ways to evaluate the outputs of scholarly research

Springer Nature has signed DORA to show its support for the development of better and more effective approaches to assessing research.

What does that mean for Springer Nature?

By signing Springer Nature undertakes to work towards upholding the recommendations that DORA outlines for publishers.

  • We will provide a wide array of metrics to allow for a fair assessment of research. 
  • We encourage responsible authorship practices and will seek to either include author contribution statements or adapt CRediT in line with the standards NISO is currently establishing.
  • We are a participant in the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and have committed to release reference list metadata publicly.
  • Our journals do not have a constrain on the number of references in research articles. 
  • We will seek to encourage the citation of primary literature in favour of reviews.

What is DORA?

DORA stands for the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment which was proposed by a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals during the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in San Francisco, California, on 16th December 2012. For more information and to read the declaration, visit https://sfdora.org/read/.

Springer Nature has long advocated for a balanced approach to research evaluation and responsible authorship practices and this move follows Springer Nature’s other brands Nature Research, Springer Open and BMC who became signatories in 2017.  Nature Research journals, in particular, have argued against the use of journal-level metrics to assess the value of individual research articles since the 1990s.