Project

The project aims at leveraging the current system employed by the University of Bologna (UNIBO) for internal research assessment and monitoring (VRA – University Research Evaluation) to raise awareness on CoARA’s reform.
Although UNIBO was among the early signatories of CoARA and co-chaired the Italian National Chapter for the first term, it struggles to implement the reform due to external and internal challenges. The main internal challenge is UNIBO's size and the diversified nature of its academic community. To address this challenge, we build on UNIBO's long experience in evaluating internal research activities, by planning to:

• Analyse the employment of VRA results by single Departments and get a comprehensive picture of the strategies they use to value research (and how close/distant they are to CoARA’s principles). 
• Initiate a discussion on CoARA’s principles within the University Research Evaluation Committee (CVRA), responsible for the VRA. 
• Organize a final event for dissemination, open to everyone but targeting especially early-career researchers.

The project will be crucial in shifting the focus from university’s governance (top-down perspective) to single Departments and researchers (bottom-up perspective), enabling them to contribute actively to CoARA’s reform.