Inter-university project FWB/CoARA

Following the signing of the CoARA agreement, an inter-university project funded by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (FWB) was created. Together, the five universities of the FWB (UCLouvain, ULB, ULiège, UNamur and UMONS) worked on themes that were both important and related to those addressed in the research evaluation reform. 

Project background

The project, entitled “Development of an inter-university good practice platform for research evaluation in line with the reform of research evaluation (CoARA)", ran from April 2024 to September 2025. 

Five working groups examined the following topics:

• WP1: defining new modalities for research evaluation
• WP2: opening scientific publications
• WP3: organisation of ethics committees: rules and practices surrounding research projects
• WP4: managing dilemmas related to scientific integrity, evolution of the concept of authorship and its abuses, debating the ‘publish or perish’ phenomenon
• WP5: strengthening support for researchers and talent development 

Each working group was coordinated by a university, while involving the other four, to enable collaborative work. UCLouvain was responsible for WP1 on defining new ways of evaluating research. 

The objectives of the working group (WP1) were defined in three distinct phases:

• an initial phase to inventory research evaluation practices, the report of which is available here
• a second phase to meet with evaluation stakeholders in order to explore their current needs and constraints, a summary report of which is available here
• a third phase to implement approaches for institutional adoption. As part of this third phase, a poster was created to raise awareness of the research evaluation reform