Research Information, Systems and Evaluation SIG - Tuesday 28 April 2026

Is 2026 the Year for Exploring the DORA or Adopting a CoARA?

What does it actually take to adopt responsible research assessment frameworks?

Join Dr Ilana Bolingford (QUT), Kate LeMay and Krista Crawford (NHMRC) as they share their real-world journeys to becoming DORA and/or CoARA signatories. They’ll talk candidly about internal sponsorship, changing assessment practices, lessons learned, and what lies ahead—alongside a discussion of communities of practice supporting this work. This is a rare opportunity to ask questions of leaders who’ve been through the process.

Event Details

Date: Tuesday, 28 April 2026

Time: 10:00AM - 11:00AM AEST (Check your timezone here)

Format: Online via Zoom

Zoom Access: Details will be provided in your confirmation email

Presenter(s)

Dr Ilana Bolingford, Research Policy and Projects Manager, QUT

Dr Ilana Bolingford is Research Policy and Projects Manager at QUT, where she co-leads the Reimagining Research Assessment program, a multi-year institutional initiative aligned with QUT’s commitment to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Her work focuses on research culture and responsible research assessment, using large-scale survey data, policy development, and strategic analysis to inform institutional reform. She brings a strong research-led perspective to this work through her PhD, which developed a constructivist grounded theory of strategic engagement for impact. Her research provides a detailed, evidence based account of how academics navigate research engagement and impact within policy and institutional constraints and offers a conceptual foundation for understanding the relationship between research assessment systems, academic practice, and research culture. Ilana’s work draws directly on these findings to inform both institutional implementation and broader sector conversations on responsible research assessment.

Kate LeMay - Assistant Director, Research Policy and Evaluation, NHMRC

Kate LeMay’s background is as a Pharmacist, working in both community and hospital settings. She has worked in health services research at the University of Sydney and Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, and in health and medical data sharing education and policy at the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). Kate is now an Assistant Director (Research Policy) in the Research Policy and Evaluation Section of the Research Foundations Branch at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). She is NHMRC’s Open Science subject matter expert and manages cross-cutting policies including responsible research assessment. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2405-7365

Krista Crawford - Senior Policy Officer, Research Policy and Evaluation, NHMRC

Krista Crawford is a Senior Policy Officer in the Research Policy and Evaluation Section of the Research Foundations Branch at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). She has an academic background in Psychology and Zoology, and previously worked as a research assistant at the University of Melbourne and Swinburne University. Krista has over eight years’ experience in research administration, having worked in the Faculty of Medicine at Monash University. At NHMRC, she works closely with Kate LeMay on cross-cutting policy initiatives and led the drafting of NHMRC’s Action Plan for Responsible Research Assessment.

Host/Facilitator

Scott McWhirter, University of Technology Sydney

I work in the area of research evaluation with a focus on developing the collaborative networks needed for UTS to understand and develop its research profile and on consequential institutional submissions to government. This mostly involves coordinating outputs and impact reporting and analysis processes. To undertake these reporting processes, UTS relies on a set of systems for which my team acts as the front-end administrators and business owners; - ResearchMaster is used to administer research projects, agreements and ethics clearances. It has interactions with Neo, CASS and the UTS BI products. - Symplectic is used for academic profiles at UTS and for the reporting of research publications. -Figshare is used to house UTS research reports. - Dimensions, Scival, Incites, Altmetric, Overton and the Lens are used to understand outputs and funding benchmarks globally. The team are proficient with APIs for all products and for all funders and are at the centre of automation work within the UTS research support community using APIs, in product tools, generative AI and Powerautomate. The team has rolled out each of these products and their upgrades as well as enterprise-wide projects like the UTS Repository (OPuS) integrations (with the Library) and the ORCID implementation at UTS. Our most recent work is on introducing a new costing and pricing tool into our standard proposals suite and the rollout of this Discovery researcher profile service. The team fields requests for research data and works closely with OQA (on KPIs and rankings), the UTS Library (on researcher development), the CDO and ITU (on the UTS Business Intelligence product and other systems). We are currently developing data science and data provisioning competencies and are assisting the university by rolling out Figshare for UTS research reports - this should improve discoverability and engagement with UTS reports. I act as co-convenor for the Australasian Research Management Society's Special Interest Group on Research Information and Reporting with Tania Wilman (from JCU).

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Questions

Contact the ARMS Executive Office:

•  ARMSMembership@researchmanagement.org.au
• +61 8 8201 5592
   

Please note: This session may be recorded and shared with SIG members.