The FNRS and the Evaluation of Research
The FNRS constantly strives to align its procedures with good practices in research evaluation. It ensures active monitoring in terms of scientific policy, in particular through its participation in working groups of reference organizations such as Science Europe, the OECD and the European Commission.
In this logic, the FNRS is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Evaluation (DORA), which encourages evaluation based on the intrinsic quality of scientific work. It also joined the agreement on the reform of the research evaluation system, the objective of which is to strengthen the quality and impact of research in Europe.
DORA
Since January 2022, the FNRS has been a signatory to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Evaluation (DORA), which consists of a set of recommendations relating to good practices in the evaluation of scientific research (www.sfdora.org). For funding agencies like the FNRS, it is a question of giving more importance to the scientific content of an article rather than to publication indicators or to the brand image of the journal (and to the Impact Factor ) in which it was published.
As such, since the 2022 call for Grants & Fellowships, candidates for Postdoctoral researcher - CR and Qualified Researcher - CQ mandates are invited to attach the 5 publications most representative of their career to their application file in “full text” format. Previously, candidates only had to list these 5 publications in the scientific part of the application file. Furthermore, they must specify the role they played in the production of each of them.
Agreement on the reform of the research evaluation system (ARRA)
As a signatory of the agreement on the reform of the research evaluation system (ARRA) since June 2023, the FNRS is actively engaged in the evolution of evaluation practices. In accordance with the commitments made, the FNRS adopted, during its Board of Directors on April 9, 2025, a Action Plan which defines, over a period of five years, concrete actions to align with the ten fundamental commitments of ARRA.
Following the evaluation activities, analysis reports are systematically written following each call. The reports include essentially statistical analyzes and make it possible to ensure the smooth running of calls as well as the absence of bias in the evaluation procedures. Furthermore, the FNRS pays particular attention to the satisfaction of its evaluators, by regularly conducting surveys among them in order to continuously improve its procedures. The page "Call analyzes and studies“ presents the recently published reports on this subject.