Our Commitments

The research sector has spent decades building systems to measure what researchers produce. It has been slower to build systems that recognise what they contribute. AcademicFellows was founded on the conviction that research excellence is more consequential, and more varied, than any single metric can capture. Across a research career, the collaborations formed across disciplines, the knowledge transferred beyond academia, the mentorship that shapes the next generation of scientists, and the technical contributions that fall outside traditional citation systems represent value that has too often remained invisible to the very institutions charged with recognising it.

This is not a peripheral problem. It shapes who advances, who is funded, what questions get asked, and which communities benefit from science. When assessment systems narrow their lens, research systems narrow with them.

AcademicFellows is built to widen that lens. The platform maps the people, expertise, institutions, and connections that constitute the research ecosystem, because visibility is the precondition for fair recognition. Researchers cannot be assessed on contributions that cannot be seen.

AcademicFellows has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). DORA holds that research should be evaluated on its own merits, that the quality of work matters more than the venue of its publication, and that the full diversity of research outputs deserves genuine recognition. These are not aspirations AcademicFellows is working toward. They are the convictions this platform was built to serve.

We welcome researchers, institutions, and funders who share these convictions.