Commitment to responsible research assessment

As part of our commitment to research integrity and responsible research practices, Babraham Institute is committed to fair and responsible research assessment. To that end, it signed the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment on 18 May 2018.

Thereby the Institute commits to the following DORA core principles:

  • Assessing research outputs and other research contributions based on their intrinsic merit
  • Discouraging the inappropriate use of proxies or metrics - such as the title or impact factor of the journal in which the work was published

Our mission is to be an international leader in research focusing on basic cell and molecular biology with an emphasis on healthy ageing through the human lifecycle.

We judge our internationally leading research and expertise by its value to others – use of our data, novel technologies and new knowledge by researchers in academia and industry, and interest in our science by a range of publics. In 2020 we collaborated with colleagues from 96 organisations in 21 countries indicating our expert contributions to global science.

However, we recognise the challenges of evaluating research outputs in the pressured current research landscape in the absence of proxies. To that end we are developing an implementation plan to encourage and support responsible research assessment covering the following areas:

  1. Evaluation
  2. Communication
  3. Recruitment
  4. Induction
  5. Training
  6. Awareness