The reform of research assessment (RRA) is one of the major challenges of the global research policy agenda. Across Europe and beyond, research performing and research funding organisations are putting a lot of effort into systemic activities aimed at moving beyond metric-driven evaluation frameworks, while embracing the principles of responsibility, transparency and equity in assessing research and researchers (DORA, 2012; CoARA, 2022). Still, the cultural change needed to translate the CoARA Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA) principles into institutional practices remains demanding, without clear implementation pathways, as organisations operate within diverse national and institutional frameworks.

The “Open Science Collaboration for Research Career Advancement and Policy Innovation at UNIRI and UCY (OSCAR)” project addressed the practical implementation of RRA and Open Science (OS) reforms in differing institutional and national contexts, with particular attention to barriers and enablers of change. Funded as one of the Teaming projects within the first CoARA Boost Cascade Funding call, OSCAR brought together the universities of Rijeka, Croatia (UNIRI) and Cyprus (UCY). The collaboration was facilitated through partners’ joint membership in the Young Universities for the Future of Europe (YUFE) European University Alliance, thus building on pre-existing trust, shared governance practices and alignment of strategic priorities, factors that proved critical for the rapid project deployment within the short funding cycle. OSCAR centred on structured peer learning, with UNIRI’s RRA experience facilitating UCY’s implementation, while simultaneously testing the transferability of practices across different contexts and national frameworks.

UNIRI’s RRA engagement has been consistent for more than 15 years, although framed within national constraints. UNIRI’s early adoption of the Human Resources Strategy for Researchers (HRS4R) and the award of the HR Excellence in Research logo, testify to a long-term institutional commitment to fair and transparent assessment practices as foundational principles of current reforms. As an early signatory of ARRA, UNIRI has developed a comprehensive institutional CoARA Action Plan 2024-2027, actively participates in two CoARA working groups, and has contributed to multiple Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects addressing research career reforms (Zelenika & Jakominić Marot, 2025a). This institutional expertise provided the knowledge base that OSCAR made use of via structured peer learning activities. Project’s impacts are better understood through a set of interrelated reform actions and their outcomes. A key activity focused on integrating OS principles into research(er) evaluation, requiring adaptation to the Cypriot context, where existing practices and governance structures differ from those in Croatia. This promoted UCY to successfully develop its own institutional CoARA Action Plan, encompassing OS principles, and drawing on a step-by-step guidance document produced by UNIRI (Zelenika & Jakominić Marot, 2025b). In the Action plan, UCY incorporated a structured stakeholder engagement strategy and a phased implementation timeline (Demetriades & Moiras, 2025). The established collaboration between the UNIRI and UCY university libraries demonstrated, in turn, their evolving role as active partners in the reform, particularly in training, repository development and curation as well as in overarching promotion and support to OS principles and practices, resulting in a Joint OS Collaboration Plan (Jakominić Marot et al., 2025). At the strategic level, Actionable Policy-Related Strategy principles (Moiras, 2025) were developed, mapping key national stakeholders in Cyprus, defining advocacy priorities and providing actionable recommendations for aligning the national research assessment framework with CoARA. Advocacy activities targeted Cypriot stakeholders, although their scope remained somewhat constrained by the limited resources, requiring prioritisation of high-impact and low-administrative-cost actions. An important project’s output was a research-on-research-based guide for validating CoARA adjustment practices, providing a structured framework for indicator selection, feedback loop design, bias prevention and quality validation, hence offering a replicable methodology for institutions seeking to assess the rigour and equity of their own evaluation practices (Maniadis, 2025). Finally, OSCAR’s outreach activities reached policymakers, regulatory authorities, and industry bodies, extending the project’s impact well beyond the academic community.

However, the project also revealed some tensions and challenges inherent in the reform processes. These included constraints associated with the project’s restricted time format, limited flexibility for iterative adjustments and the need to begin implementation with minimal preparation, which required strong pre-existing alignment and trust between partners. Resistance to change emerged primarily around the perceived loss of objectivity when moving away from quantitative indicators, requiring wide reaching communication, awareness raising and carefully tuned stakeholder engagement activities. Additionally, both UNIRI and UCY remain embedded in national legislative frameworks, constraining considerably the possible extent of institutional reforms.

On the other hand, the fostered wide engagement with partners’ communities has led to positive effects in the involved ecosystems. In fact, the UCY leadership of the Cyprus CoARA National Chapter has led to the formal signing of the CoARA agreement by the European University Cyprus. Also, Neapolis University, the CYENS Centre of Excellence, and the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences submitted proposals under the second CoARA Boost call. The latter two were successful and received the grants for their projects. As testimonials of the ARRA transition from aspiration to institutional practices and cultures, these effects illustrate that structured peer learning between institutions, embedded in a well-designed collaborative project with openly available outputs, can act as a genuine catalyst for a broader community change.

For the PUBMET community, OSCAR experiences provide a valuable insight into concrete realities of implementing RRA and OS reforms. They demonstrate the value of cross-institutional collaboration grounded in shared values, but also show that such a collaboration must account for contextual differences, governance constraints and different levels of institutional readiness, often slowing reform adoption. They also reaffirm the strategic role of university libraries not merely as service providers, but as active partners in building and sustaining OS (and thus ARRA) communities. Also, the importance of project tools and outputs shared in open repositories is further reinforced, particularly in enabling reuse and adaptation across institutions building on the generated knowledge base.

OSCAR offers therefore an evidence-based good practice example that responsible assessment, OS and transparency are, at their core, community endeavours. It has also shown that there are numerous tools and practices scattered throughout different communities, but that selecting and adapting them to specific institutional contexts remains a key challenge. Addressing this gap requires structured guidance and shared frameworks to which initiatives such as the newly launched CoARA collection, as well as some initiated “spin-off” Horizon Europe project initiatives, may constitute good initial steps in the right direction.