Research must be judged on its own terms.
Durham & Thunmann Press has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment because the worth of research cannot be borrowed from the reputation of the journal in which it appears. An argument is not made sound by a ranking, nor is a careful inquiry made unimportant by the absence of a fashionable numerical signal.
The decision to sign DORA is therefore not a ceremonial addition to our name. It is a public statement about how an academic press ought to exercise judgment: by attending to the substance of a contribution, the quality of its evidence, the fitness of its method, and the clarity with which its limits are disclosed.
Judgment cannot be delegated to a number
Scholarly communication depends upon forms of selection. Editors decide what enters review; reviewers distinguish strong claims from weak ones; readers decide what deserves attention, criticism, or further use. None of these choices becomes more responsible merely because it is transferred to a calculation.
Citation counts, download totals, journal rankings, and other indicators may reveal something about circulation or attention. Properly defined and carefully interpreted, they can be useful evidence. Yet evidence of attention is not evidence of truth, originality, or lasting value. A widely discussed paper may be flawed. A narrowly read paper may alter the foundations of a field. The same number can mean different things in different disciplines, at different stages of a career, and over different periods of time.
The temptation to compress these differences into a single scale is understandable. It saves time and creates an appearance of comparability. But the appearance is purchased by setting aside much of what responsible assessment is meant to discover. When the identity of a journal becomes a substitute for reading the work, prestige is allowed to decide in advance what judgment was supposed to determine.
Durham & Thunmann Press rejects that substitution. We will present quantitative indicators as limited signs, not verdicts. We will not use a journal-level measure as a proxy for the quality of an individual article or the ability of an individual researcher. We will work to make the evidence surrounding a publication more open, more intelligible, and more useful to readers who must form their own reasoned conclusions.
No calculation can absolve an editor, reviewer, institution, or reader from the responsibility to judge the work itself.
What responsible assessment requires
Our approach rests on five rules.
Substance before venue
Research should be assessed through its question, reasoning, method, evidence, and contribution. The name of the journal may supply context; it cannot supply the judgment.
A measure must have a stated purpose
An indicator should be used only for the question it can reasonably help to answer. Article views may describe recorded attention on a particular platform. They do not establish research quality, social benefit, methodological soundness, or the reasons for which a work was consulted.
Sources and definitions must be visible
A number without a definition invites a confidence it has not earned. Where Durham & Thunmann Press reports usage data, we will explain what has been counted, the period covered, and the principal limits of the measure.
Context is part of the evidence
Disciplines differ in size, publication rhythm, citation practice, access to infrastructure, and the forms through which knowledge travels. Comparison without regard to these conditions can be precise in appearance and arbitrary in effect.
Human judgment remains accountable
Responsible assessment does not mean replacing one automatic rule with another. It requires decisions that can be explained, questioned, and revised in the light of relevant evidence.
The proper sequence
The sequence matters. When a metric is permitted to bypass context and judgment, it ceases to assist assessment and begins to govern it.
What we do today
The following practices form the present baseline of Durham & Thunmann Press and its current journals. Each claim will be linked to the relevant public policy, article record, or service wherever possible.
| Area | Present practice | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Access | Articles in our current journals are made openly available without a reader paywall. | Research can be examined by readers rather than judged through second-hand signals. |
| Author charges | Our current journals publish under a diamond open-access model and do not levy article processing charges. | The ability to publish should not depend upon an author’s access to publication funds. |
| Licensing | Published articles carry an explicit open licence, currently CC BY 4.0 where stated by the journal. | Reuse rights are visible and can be exercised without uncertainty. |
| Persistent identification | Published articles receive DOI identifiers and structured bibliographic records. | Work can be reliably found, cited, and distinguished from similarly titled material. |
| Researcher identification | ORCID identifiers are supported in article and author metadata where supplied. | Contributions can be attributed with less ambiguity across names and institutions. |
| Machine-readable discovery | Journal content is exposed through structured metadata and scholarly discovery services, including OAI-PMH and citation exports. | Open assessment requires information that is not confined to the visual page. |
| Article-level evidence | The journals distinguish recorded abstract views from full-text file accesses. | Readers can inspect limited evidence of attention at the level of the work rather than relying on journal prestige. |
| Public editorial rules | Editorial, peer-review, ethics, correction, and access policies are published on the journal websites. | Decisions can be assessed against rules that are visible in advance. |
These practices do not complete the work required by DORA. They establish the point from which further changes can be judged.
What indicators can and cannot tell us
| Indicator | It may help to describe | It cannot establish by itself |
|---|---|---|
| Abstract views | Recorded interest in an article page on the journal platform | Whether the article was read closely, accepted, rejected, or understood |
| Full-text accesses | Recorded openings or downloads of an available article file | Whether the work is rigorous, influential, or beneficial |
| Citations | Documented reuse, discussion, criticism, or acknowledgement in citing literature | The purpose, quality, or approval expressed by the citation |
| Journal-level metrics | Certain patterns across a defined set of journal content | The quality of a particular article or the merit of a particular researcher |
| Journal identity | Editorial scope, community, and publication context | A transferable measure of the worth of everything the journal publishes |
Durham & Thunmann Press will not conceal these distinctions behind the convenient language of “impact.” Where a more exact term is available—views, full-text accesses, citations, discussion, reuse—we will prefer it.
Our public roadmap
Signing DORA creates an obligation to act in public. The roadmap below separates established practice from work that remains to be done. Its stages describe order and priority; they are not claims that unfinished work has already been completed.
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01Next
Establish a consistent policy baseline
Planned- Audit the language used across Durham & Thunmann Press and its journals to ensure that journal-level metrics are not presented as measures of individual articles or researchers.
- Publish common definitions for abstract views, full-text accesses, downloads where separately measurable, and any future citation indicators.
- State the source, coverage period, refresh interval, and known limitations of quantitative information displayed on our platforms.
- Create a stable public location for this DORA statement and record the date of each material revision.
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02Then
Strengthen attribution and research metadata
Planned- Introduce the CRediT contributor-role taxonomy in a form appropriate to each journal’s disciplines and workflows.
- Strengthen the collection and validation of ORCID identifiers while avoiding unnecessary barriers for authors.
- Expand support for open reference metadata through Crossref and other suitable scholarly infrastructure.
- Improve guidance for the citation and identification of datasets, software, protocols, and other research objects.
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03Developing
Put article-level evidence in context
Planned- Review the presentation of usage information so that article views and full-text accesses are clearly distinguished and not described as measures of quality.
- Examine whether additional article-level evidence can be shown responsibly, with definitions and without collapsing unlike forms of attention into a single score.
- Preserve privacy by publishing aggregate statistics only; no personally identifiable reader information will form part of the public evidence.
- Review rankings and “most read” lists periodically for methodological clarity, bot filtering, and the risk of misleading comparisons.
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04Longer term
Increase openness and accountability
Planned- Examine where peer-review reports, editorial decisions, and author responses can be published with consent and without weakening legitimate confidentiality.
- Develop clearer policies for the availability and citation of research data and software, taking account of ethical, legal, and disciplinary constraints.
- Review editorial and assessment practices for avoidable disadvantages associated with discipline, language, geography, career stage, institutional prestige, or access to funding.
- Publish a periodic progress record showing completed actions, work in progress, revisions, and reasons for any change of direction.
A declaration should remain open to correction
Durham & Thunmann Press will review this statement at least once each year and after any material change to the assessment practices of its journals. The page will display its latest review date and a concise record of substantive revisions.
Readers, authors, reviewers, and institutions who identify an inconsistency between this statement and our practice are invited to contact the Press. A public commitment is meaningful only if those affected by it can point to the distance between its words and its execution.
Contact the Press about responsible research assessmentThe commitment in its wider context
Durham & Thunmann Press is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).
Last reviewed20 August 2026
Commitment statusPublic implementation roadmap adopted