Research Quality Plus: Another way is possible

This article introduces a different approach to research quality governance. We argue the Research Quality Plus, or RQ+, approach holds practical value for defining, managing, and evaluating quality. For those who wish to move from quality improvement to the comparison and ranking implied by excellence RQ+ may offer a starting point. We note this was not our initial intent. RQ+ was co-developed by the International Development Research Centre with colleagues from across our research community in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. RQ+ builds on the deliberative approach of peer-review and the analytics of biblio- and altmetrics. RQ+ holds three tenets: (1) quality is value-based, (2) context matters, and (3) judgement should be empirical and systematic. We summarise a large-scale meta-analysis of research evaluations conducted using RQ+ to demonstrate initial validation of the approach. We conclude with a call to action for critique, trialing, experimentation, and co-development.