Aligning Research Curation and Open Assessment

We are excited to announce our first ICOR public meeting of the year. The topic will focus on the opportunity for aligning research curation and open assessment. Please join us on Tuesday April 7, (8am PST, 11am EST, 4pm GMT, 5pm CET).

Here, you can find the meeting’s public agenda and a link to register for the event.

Innovations in scholarly communication are currently moving toward a more modular and transparent approach. Rather than relying on a single event to define the value of research, parts of the community are experimenting with different implementations of the Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) framework. A key tenet of this approach is to treat the act of sharing and evaluation as continuous processes, which better reflects how the work is done and allows for a more nuanced understanding of research quality.

Recent activity in this space has moved this conversation forward, focusing on the infrastructure and policy alignment required to make ongoing, open curation a standard part of the research lifecycle. We are seeing a coordinated advance in how research is validated and shared, moving toward a model where the distinct acts of publishing, reviewing, and curating are recognised as valuable in their own right.

Historically, the landscape of innovation in scholarly communication has been fractured, slowing down widespread change and adoption of new models. Central to the new wave of progress is a growing understanding of the need for collective action. Rather than individual platforms operating in silos, there is now a clear effort to establish shared standards and governance. The emerging collaborative approach is working towards a unified framework that makes open evaluation a reliable and trackable component of a researcher’s portfolio. Through coordination, organisations are starting to address the long-standing challenge of how to make diverse contributions, such as peer-review reports and curated assessments, visible to those who evaluate research for funding and career progression.

This shift is increasingly aligned with global movements for assessment reform. As organizations like CoARA and DORA advocate for valuing a wider range of research outputs, the infrastructure being built today is providing the necessary tools to make that vision a reality. The focus is shifting toward a scholarly environment where the process of evaluation is as open and dynamic as the research itself, ensuring that all contributors to the ecosystem whether they are authors, reviewers, or curators are recognized for their role in advancing knowledge.

To provide deeper insight into some leading projects around research curation and open assessment, we have invited three expert speakers:

Katie Corker, Executive Director, ASAPBio who will discuss the efforts by the international community to unify reform initiatives and align their strategic agendas.

Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) discussing the formation of the PRC Alliance and its collective goals.

Ludo Waltman, Scientific Director and Professor of Quantitative Science Studies at Leiden University explaining the role of the Barcelona Declaration on open research information in enabling science policy decisions based on transparent evidence and inclusive data.

While the projects highlighted during this meeting demonstrate the progress being made, the real strength of these initiatives lies in a collective alignment on curation and assessment. If you are leading work that mirrors these goals, we’d love to hear from you; coordinating our efforts is the surest way to amplify our shared impact.

Looking ahead, we’re already sourcing pivotal topics for next year’s ICOR public meetings and would value your perspective via our Google Form. In the meantime, we encourage you to list your latest projects on Open Research Beacon; it’s the best way to spark the kind of cross-network collaborations with the wider open research community.