Launch of the CoARA Collection: A Community-Owned Library of Tools for Reform
As the coalition celebrated its third anniversary at the end of 2025, the coalition’s tools for reform are evolving along with CoARA’s development and expansion. Moving from shared principles towards concrete, actionable reform, the launch of the CoARA Collection marks an important milestone in this journey.
As a coalition built on collective action and mutual learning, CoARA’s key communities, including Working Groups, National Chapters, and Cascade Funding beneficiaries, have been developing tools and resources over the past three years. These resources serve as the foundation for the CoARA Collection: a community-owned resource library that consolidates tools to support institutions in their reform journeys, putting CoARA Commitments into action.
First presented to members at the CoARA General Assembly in December 2025, the Collection is now open to the wider research community. It brings together the first outputs developed by CoARA Working Groups, alongside foundational third-party resources that informed the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA). The Collection will also feature outputs produced by CoARA National Chapters and Cascade Funding beneficiaries.
The CoARA Collection is a streamlined, openly accessible resource library that consolidates outputs endorsed either by the CoARA Steering Board or by the wider CoARA Community.
Types of Documents in the CoARA Collection
The Endorsement Framework recognises that reform requires different kinds of resources for different purposes. As such, the Collection includes two main categories of endorsed outputs:
- Actionable Policy Documents
These documents provide concrete, practical pathways to implement reform. They may include frameworks, guidelines, recommendations, or tools designed to be directly used by institutions, funders, or other research actors.
- Endorsed by: the CoARA Steering Board
- Purpose: to provide actionable steps for the implementation of reform
- Use cases: institutional policy reform, assessment redesign, operational guidance
- Evidence-Based Review Documents
These outputs provide context, analysis, and insight into why reform is needed and how it can be approached. They may include surveys, landscape analyses, guiding principles, conceptual frameworks, or reflective reports.
- Endorsed by: the CoARA Community
- Purpose: to inform discussion, learning, and reflection to strengthen the shared understanding of the need for reform
- Use cases: surveys, guiding principles, literature reviews
Outputs in the CoARA Collection are categorised by the type of output, the relevant CoARA community that produced the output (i.e., Working Group, National Chapter, and third parties such as Cascade Funding beneficiaries), and by the relevant commitments that the outputs address.
By offering practical tools for reform, the CoARA Collection aims to add to the rich pool of resources offered by our sister initiative, Declaration on Research Assessment – DORA, to further support institutions, funders, and researchers in their reform journeys built on quality, impact, and equity. As such, the Collection aims to provide pathways for reform for the wider research community to transform the CoARA Commitments into collective action.
Explore the CoARA Collection here: www.coara.org/collection
Learn more about the Endorsement process through the following resources:
If you are part of a relevant CoARA community (Working Group, National Chapter, Cascade Funding beneficiary), submit your output for endorsement here:
For any questions or inquiries, please contact us at communication@coara.org !