1. Preamble: The Changing Landscape of Academic Assessment
The Reality of Metric Proliferation: As highlighted by prominent global experts such as Angel Calderon (RMIT University, Australia), university rankings have continued to proliferate in recent years, with a near-universal recognition that they are unlikely to disappear. It would be valuable to acknowledge that rankings, despite their limitations, have contributed to greater transparency, international visibility, and institutional benchmarking. The issue is not necessarily the existence of rankings, but how they are designed, interpreted, and used.
Consequently, the challenge for the global academic community is to move beyond passive reaction and toward an era of informed engagement. GOAMUR is established to equip governments, university leaders, media, and society with the analytical tools to engage with rankings and academic data responsibly and ethically. In addition to the integrity challenges, we recognize the significant expansion and democratization of knowledge production, which necessitates a parallel evolution in how we demonstrate trust in academia.
The Indicator Dependency: Modern higher education and global science have developed a systemic dependence on digital indicators (h-index, impact factors, and various institutional rankings). While rankings have contributed to international visibility, institutional benchmarking, and increased awareness of performance, their current design and usage often overshadow the broader missions of higher education.
The Dual Pathology: This over-reliance has triggered a dual crisis. At the individual level, it fuels a “publication race” characterized by paper mills, citation cartels, and predatory journals. At the institutional level, it drives a “reputation race” involving metadata manipulation, emergence of fake mirror rankings, and the misuse of persistent identifiers. It is important to note that research is only one fraction of the vital roles universities play in society.
The Structural Way Forward: We must seek to decouple the systemic dependency on narrow bibliometric and reputation data. University rankings should be viewed as voluntary, contextualized benchmarking tools rather than drivers of state funding or policy. We advocate for a shift from passive compliance toward an international governance system for data collection, definition, storage, and regulation that engenders confidence and trust.
The Evolution of Oversight: Traditional oversight frameworks have proven insufficient against the rise of sophisticated digital anomalies. GOAMUR advances from voluntary guidelines toward independent, evidence-based empirical data auditing and algorithmic accountability to protect the global academic ecosystem.
Our Lineage and Evolution: The GOAMUR Manifesto is a global initiative modelled after and advancing the core philosophies of historic initiatives, such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), the Leiden Manifesto, and the Stockholm Declaration. It allows universities, research integrity bodies, and scholars to officially sign and unite to advocate for computational reproducibility and algorithmic transparency.
2. Our Mission
GOAMUR acts as an independent, evidence-based observatory. We audit, detect, and analyze practices involving academic metrics and rankings, advocating for systemic improvements based on our findings.
3. The Core Pillar: The Reproducibility Principle
Scientific Consensus: Any academic ranking must ensure full reproducibility of its calculations.
Open Data: Developers are encouraged to publish their methodology and primary data matrices. Transparency is the prerequisite for validity.
Critical Scrutiny: We urge policymakers and institutions to exercise critical scrutiny over all rankings. As providers increasingly rely on AI tools, we must ensure these systems do not introduce opaque risks to data reliability.
4. The Principle of Ranking Diversity
The Fallacy of Homogenization: Globalization, market mechanisms, and global university rankings have contributed to the homogenization of curricula and the outcomes of research and educational activities. Global rankings, by disregarding the contextual specificities of diverse institutions and failing to capture multidimensional institutional performance, often promote a narrow model of the university, thereby inadvertently delegitimizing other essential institutional forms.
The Call for Ranking Diversity: Just as we defend linguistic and publication diversity (bibliodiversity), we must defend ranking diversity. We encourage regional and professional associations to launch evaluation systems that are pluralistic, decentralized, and fundamentally adapted to the specific socio-economic missions and profiles of the institutions they evaluate. This involves restructuring subject typologies, which are arbitrary in nature and not universally accepted, so that they better reflect natural academic disciplines and the specific characteristics of various institutional roles.
Empowering Alternative Models: Therefore, moving away from the era of rigid and universal scales, we call upon independent regional, national, and professional university associations to actively design and launch their own tailored evaluation systems. Future academic metrics must be pluralistic, decentralized, and fundamentally adapted to the specific socio-economic missions and profiles of the institutions they evaluate, ensuring true fitness for purpose.
5. Advocating for Global, National, and Regional Sustainability
We reject the application of ‘one-size-fits-all’ global commercial metrics to evaluate university contributions to society. GOAMUR supports the establishment of independent, context-sensitive ranking systems. Frameworks must be designed to reflect localized needs, ensuring that institutions are valued for their real-world impact rather than their compliance with standardized commercial algorithms.
6. Call to Action: Layered Commitments
We invite academic institutions, ranking agencies, publishers and scientific journals, data aggregators, and regulators to join us through active stakeholder engagement:
- For Ranking Administrators and Data Providers: Commit to transparency, publish verification data, adopt rigorous validation protocols using open APIs (ROR/ORCID), and commit to continuous methodological improvement.
- For Academic Institutions: Exercise critical sovereignty by managing your own metadata at the source and utilizing evidence-based findings to contest inaccurate data.
- For the Broad Academic Community: Practice metric hygiene, support open scientometrics that prioritize human judgment, and advocate for ethical, verifiable data practices.
- For Publishers and Scientific Journals: Implement strict ethical standards, completely refrain from participating in the activities of “paper mills” and citation cartels, and ensure the transparency of peer-review processes to prevent the manipulation of scientometric indicators.
- For Regulatory Bodies and International Organizations: Decouple policy from opaque “black box” rankings, mandate data integrity standards, and fund open academic infrastructure to ensure data remains a global public good.
Governance and Ownership of Academic Data
- Reclaiming Data Sovereignty: Universities must retain ownership of their institutional metadata and practice responsible data governance. We reject models where public research outputs are captured by private oligopolies.
- Algorithmic Accountability: We demand transparency regarding AI training and criteria. AI must support, not replace, qualitative human peer review.
- Public Infrastructure: We advocate for non-commercial regulatory frameworks for higher education data. By shifting toward open, public science infrastructures, we can restore international confidence, guarantee algorithmic trust, and eliminate the vulnerabilities of the contemporary metric industry.
