Excellence in research assessment a priority for the CFI

OTTAWA, ON — Today, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) reaffirmed its commitment to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), a global initiative to support the development and promotion of best practices in the assessment of scholarly research, at the Canadian Science Policy Conference in Ottawa. The CFI, along with other federal funding agencies — the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Genome Canada — signed DORA to demonstrate its commitment to excellence in research assessment.

READ: Joint statement by the CFI and research funding agencies

The CFI became a DORA signatory in 2018 since its rigorous merit-review process is already aligned with the principles outlined in the declaration. As a funder of research infrastructure, it employs a comprehensive range of criteria to examine the excellence of the research and the research team, as well as the need for the infrastructure and the benefits to Canada.

READ AND WATCH: How does the CFI decide which projects get funding?

DORA was developed in response to the research community’s concern about the overreliance on journal publication as a key measure of the quality of research and its results. The CFI believes that the value and impact of research cannot be measured through journal publications alone. Their merit is based on a range of outputs and impact measures.