What is Open Science and responsible research? What are opportunities, what are challenges?
University of Minho is hosting the OSF 2019
In September 2019, scientists, policy makers and representatives from around the world came together in Porto for the 2nd Open Science Fair.
Open Science faces many challenges. Mainly traditional research habits accompanied by
- non-incentive institutional and funder reward systems,
- the lack of embedded tools and services,
- and the missing connection to non-academic communities.
The conference critically showcased the elements required for the transition to Open Science: e-infrastructures and services, policies, research flows and new types of activities and roles.
For FIT4RRI, the main screws to adjust to move Open Science forward are training and governance settings.
Collaborate for Open Science training
At the OSF, we have seen how important it is that all the different training initiatives exchange and share what works and what doesn’t. All of us face the same challenges when it comes to the FAIRness and sustainability of our materials. Especially, as we are moving towards the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), which will provide a training catalogue and access point, we need to identify best practices and find out the community’s needs.
It’s time to move – let’s change governance settings
Keynote by Paola Mazusso @pcmasuzzo CC BY SA
We can identify many of the challenges clearly, e.g. related to research assessment.
FIT4RRI conducted an analysis of trends, barriers and drivers. Other initiatives came to similar results.
The first step towards change is to identify problems and we are already at the next step. During OSF we saw several examples of change already being initiated.
Perhaps, one could say that the community is in a testing stage, where different solutions are implemented and we will soon see what works and truly contributes to a change in the system.
FIT4RRI just finishes its “testing phase”, in which four co-creation experiments (i.a. about TDM and Photonics) observed RRI and Open Science in action. Now we are looking at mutual learnings to recommend what works when implementing new practices on institutional level.
In conclusion, we need to strengthen our collaborations and continue engaging different actors from academia, industry, society and government. We are adjusting various screws, e.g. training, policies & funding requirements, research assessment criteria. All of them go hand in hand. FIT4RRI hopes to contribute to a long lasting shift towards a research environment that is more open, inclusive and responsible. New training courses and guidelines for governance settings are in production.
Fading out a day of fruitful discussions next to the Douro river in Porto
This edition of the Open Science Fair was organized as an emblematic initiative of OpenAIRE, co-organized by 3 other EU-funded projects in the area of Open Science: FIT4RRI, EOSC Secretariat and FAIRsFAIR. It was locally curated by the University of Minho.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to the Open Science Fair 2019.
In particular, we would like to thank everyone contributing to the OSF video and Imming Impact for creating it with FIT4RRI.
Thank you Ay Mey Lie for contributing to this blog post.