Polish academic community is mostly concerned with the central, legally declared national system of the institutional evaluation, which is widely considered as dominated by bibliometric indicators. Moreover, those rules are too often inexpertly mirrored in the internal assessments of individual researchers in hiring, promotion or rewarding procedures. This situation calls for a deep change, and suggestions for the reforms come from various sources. However, implementing the CoARA principles of limiting the importance of quantitative indicators in favor of qualitative assessment using expert reviews may be much more difficult to implement for the institutional evaluation than in the case of individuals or teams. These tasks will need different approaches, what requires comprehensive discussions at national level with all stakeholders. Main mission assumed for the National Chapter is to interface the ideas worked out within CoARA to Polish national legislation. 

There are 60 CoARA signatories in Poland. The NC-PL comprises 47 members, including universities and other HEIs, research institutes, junior researcher associations, the Polish Academy of Science, and the Rectors Conference. We are open to both CoARA signatories (with voting status) and non-signatories (with observer status). Importantly, we work in close contact with the Main Council of Science and Higher Education and the Science Evaluation Committee – the body preparing national evaluation rules.  

Taking advantage of the diversity of our NC-PL, including the presence of research funding agencies and representatives of ministerial advisory bodies, we want to monitor emerging reform proposals and assess their compliance with the national legal framework, with possible suggestions for the desired legal changes. We also want to prevent inconsistencies between different types of evaluations to which researchers are subjected. That should include diminishing negative aspects of long-term self-employments relying solely on temporary positions within projects awarded from granting agencies by introducing a systemic solution allowing to offer scientists entry into a tenure track. All our actions will be accompanied by a constant strive towards extending the numbers of active participants of the national chapter, its task forces, and CoARA as a whole. 

The NC-PL is coordinated by the Jagiellonian University and the Koszalin University of Technology. Activities are carried out within six task forces: i) Data collection and analysis; ii) Research career pathways; iii) Academic career diversity; iv) Institutional evaluation; v) Project assessment; vi) CoARA monitoring. Each institution included in NC-PL appoints its representative or representatives to any number of task forces. The activity of each task force is organized by the leader or leaders chosen by each team. Our members are also involved in six CoARA working groups and co-lead two of them. 

Task force meetings are organized online every few weeks. Additionally, the NC-PL has two types of meetings: of the steering group, i.e. task forces leaders and NC-PL coordinators (online, depending on needs), and plenary meetings with all interested members, probably 1-2 per year. One of such plenary meetings is planned to take the form of an in-person seminar.  

If necessary, between meetings, we distribute documents to all NC-PL members for review (e.g. call for opinion on a ministerial proposal for the regulation of open science or discussion on the proposal for the research evaluation reform prepared by the team of the Polish Academy of Sciences). These collected opinions may become the basis for seminar discussions and formulating the NC-PL positions.