An open toolkit for tracking open science partnership implementation and impact

Abstract

Serious concerns about the way research is organized collectively are increasingly being raised. They include the escalating costs of research and lower research productivity, low public trust in researchers to report the truth, lack of diversity, poor community engagement, ethical concerns over research practices, and irreproducibility. Open science (OS) collaborations comprise of a set of practices including open access publication, open data sharing and the absence of restrictive intellectual property rights with which institutions, firms, governments and communities are experimenting in order to overcome these concerns. We gathered two groups of international representatives from a large variety of stakeholders to construct a toolkit to guide and facilitate data collection about OS and non-OS collaborations. Ultimately, the toolkit will be used to assess and study the impact of OS collaborations on research and innovation. The toolkit contains the following four elements: 1) an annual report form of quantitative data to be completed by OS partnership administrators; 2) a series of semi-structured interview guides of stakeholders; 3) a survey form of participants in OS collaborations; and 4) a set of other quantitative measures best collected by other organizations, such as research foundations and governmental or intergovernmental agencies. We opened our toolkit to community comment and input. We present the resulting toolkit for use by government and philanthropic grantors, institutions, researchers and community organizations with the aim of measuring the implementation and impact of OS partnership across these organizations. We invite these and other stakeholders to not only measure, but to share the resulting data so that social scientists and policy makers can analyse the data across projects.

An open toolkit for tracking open science partnership implementation and impact

“…The global stakeholders we convened in the second stage in Washington, DC in October 2017 included thought-leaders from developed and developing nations, intergovernmental organizations, researchers, governments, science agencies, funders, members from the philanthropic sector, patient organizers, and members from biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and artificial intelligence industries (see extended data, Supplementary File 4 ( Gold, 2019) for a list of participants). After presenting our definition of open science and discussing the example of the MNI, stakeholders together engaged in a series of facilitated discussions asking what success of OS means from the point of view of researchers, governments, industry, philanthropies and patients.…”

“…At the third stage, we assembled a group of global experts across diverse fields—including innovation measurement and policy, law, public engagement, bibliometrics, economics, business and sociology—in London, UK in May-June 2018 to develop a set of measures to underpin the development of the prospective measurement toolkit (see extended data, Supplementary File 5 ( Gold, 2019) for a list of participants). To provide continuity, we included some participants from the Washington Forum in this workshop.…”

“…These groups developed working documents with a mixture of quantitative (e.g., counts, revenues, patents, students, survey results, etc.) and qualitative (principally semi-structured interview guides) to provide a nuanced set of data through which to study OS partnerships (see extended data, Supplementary File 6 ( Gold, 2019)).…”

Expanding the actions of Open Government in higher education sector: From web transparency to Open Science

“…Although today, there is little tendency to share research data in universities [ 19 ], Open Access to publications has increasingly positioned as an option for scientists to give visibility to their research [ 23 , 24 ]. Mainly, the literature at this respect focuses on theoretical aspects of Open Access, explaining the rationale for open initiatives [ 25 ]; literature review on the academic, social, and economic impact of Open Access [ 26 ], or developing measures of the effect of Open Science collaboration on research and innovation [ 27 ].…”

The Economic Impacts of Open Science: A Rapid Evidence Assessment

“…There is a lack of available, comparable data on actual use of open science outputs-where possible, repositories and open collaborations should collect more data on costs, usage and users. A toolkit for tracking open science impacts has recently been developed to help improve and formalize this process [74]. Research is needed on how openness affects local vs. global return to R&D. Better understanding is needed of how firms make use of R&D outputs, including open outputs.…”