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Towards Smarter Research Assessment: Open Science, Open Infrastructures & the Promise of MyResearchFolio

03 Jul 2025

At ISSI 2025 in Yerevan, Natalia Manola and Zenia Xenou from OpenAIRE introduced MyResearchFolio provided by OpenAIRE, its new pilot service designed to support the ongoing shift toward responsible research assessment. The conference, hosted this year in Armenia, brought together leading voices in scientometrics and information science for in-depth discussions on indicators, research assessment, and the transformative role of AI in researcher and evaluation workflows.

It was a real pleasure to be in Yerevan, where we had the opportunity to meet our Armenian NOAD, Shushanik Sahakyan, who organized and hosted the event at Yerevan State University. Thanks to her dedication and support, the event was a great success from start to finish.

As Europe advances its research reform agenda—driven by the COARA Agreement, the COARA Working Group on Open Infrastructures for RRA (OI4RRA), and the Barcelona Declaration on Research Assessment—MyResearchFolio offers a concrete tool to operationalise change.

Open Science and Open Infrastructures: Enablers of Reform

The transition away from publication-based metrics demands more inclusive, flexible, and transparent evaluation models. This is where Open Science and Open Infrastructures become essential drivers of change. For over a decade, OpenAIRE has been at the forefront, enabling FAIR, open, and trusted scholarly communication. Its OpenAIRE Graph—processing 400M+ records monthly—offers a holistic view of research, connecting:

Publications, research data, and software
Services, models, patents, and workflows
Projects, grants, infrastructures, and institutions
Indicators for Open Science practices, usage, reproducibility, and societal impact

These connections allow for diverse research contributions to be surfaced and assessed meaningfully.

2. MyResearchFolio: Blending Narratives and Metrics

MyResearchFolio builds on this foundation by introducing a researcher-centric profile service that combines qualitative narrative CVs with quantitative indicators. Its goal is to support researchers, institutions, and funders in experimenting with combined assessment practices and identifying what works best across domains, disciplines, and stages of career.

Key Features:

Overlay on ORCID and national identifiers

MyResearchFolio integrates seamlessly with ORCID IDs, ensuring researchers build upon their existing digital identities. The connection with ORCID will be bidirectional, enabling researchers to integrate verified data from ORCID into their Folio and push enriched content back to ORCID. This ensures interoperability with CRIS and national CV platforms, making it easy to align institutional workflows with individual profiles. The result: a trusted, synchronised, and reusable researcher profile across systems.

Customisable narrative templates

The service supports flexible narrative CV formats, allowing researchers to express their contributions in rich and meaningful ways. Templates encourage the inclusion of leadership roles, interdisciplinary work, community engagement, mentorship, and openness. Adaptable across domains and career stages, these narratives will bring context and nuance into assessment.

Embedded Open Science indicators

A key feature of MyResearchFolio is the integration of Open Science indicators from the OpenAIRE Graph directly into researcher profiles. These will include:

The FAIRness and openness of outputs
Use of open repositories and infrastructures
Links to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Evidence of reproducibility and responsible data sharing
This enables evaluators to understand and reward responsible practices, and researchers to demonstrate alignment with evolving Open Science policies.

Connected to the OpenAIRE Graph

MyResearchFolio is enriched by the OpenAIRE Graph, one of the most comprehensive open scholarly metadata collections. This means that a researcher's profile automatically benefits from a vast, interlinked dataset, covering research outputs, funding, affiliations, citations, infrastructure usage, and more. It ensures the information presented is verified, contextualised, and discoverable, providing a solid foundation for transparent and responsible evaluation.

Building on What Works: From OPUS to GraspOS

This work is built on solid ground. MyResearchFolio stems from the Horizon Europe project @GraspOS, where OpenAIRE has been leading efforts to design tools and services that make responsible research assessment practical. It also draws from @OPUS, which explored new evaluation frameworks and how they can be adopted in institutions and funders.

Together, these projects provide a tested foundation to ensure that MyResearchFolio reflects real-world needs and policy goals, and helps institutions move from principles to practice.

Aligning with COARA and the Barcelona Declaration

The development of MyResearchFolio is fully aligned with:

The COARA WG on Open Infrastructures for RRA, which advocates for publicly owned, community-driven infrastructures to support reform
The Barcelona Declaration on Research Assessment, which calls for unified, immediate, and meaningful change across Europe and globally

OpenAIRE's contribution lies in providing open, federated services that offer institutions and funders a space to test new formats, monitor adoption, and embed responsible practices within their systems.

3. Get Involved – Co-create the Future

The MyResearchFolio pilot will run over the next year, offering researchers, institutions, and funders a space to co-develop and validate new assessment practices.

We invite:

Researchers, to showcase the full spectrum of their contributions
Institutions, to experiment with fairer, context-rich evaluation models
Funders and evaluators, to align policy and practice with Open Science principles

Synergies are essential. Reform happens when infrastructures, policies, and communities work in tandem. Join us in shaping a more responsible, transparent, and inclusive research assessment future.