New report on Open Science and societal engagement in research

The European Commission has the ambition for open science to become the norm for research and innovation across the European Resea

The report presents insights and recommendations from a workshop held on 1 July 2021 attended by beneficiaries of the Science with and for Society (SwafS) Responsible Research and Innovation institutional change portfolio of projects funded under Horizon 2020 and the initial group of European University Alliances under the European Universities Initiative that received funding under the SwafS programme. Participants of the workshop discussed how open science and societal engagement could be enabled to become the norm in research performing organisations across the European Research Area, with a particular focus on universities.

Open science consists in the sharing of knowledge, data and tools as early as possible in the Research and Innovation (R&I) process, in open collaboration with all relevant knowledge actors, including academia, industry, public authorities, end users, citizens and society at large. Open science has the potential to increase the quality, efficiency and impact of R&I, lead to greater responsiveness to societal challenges, and increase trust of society in the science system.

The outcome of the workshop were various recommendations for reforms to be made:

• Universities and other research performing organisations should make reforms to criteria, metrics and processes supporting researchers’ recruitment and career progression in order to reward open science practices.
• The European Commission, national research funders and national policy makers should consider the institutionalisation of open science in universities and other research performing organisations
• The European Commission, national policy makers and research funders, universities and other research performing organisations should continue to make reforms to indicators, measures and processes utilised by them in project, programme, researcher and research unit evaluations to ensure these include assessment and evaluation of open science practices.
• University ranking organisations should undertake substantial reforms to criteria, metrics and methods that underpin ranking systems for universities in order to reward open science practices.

The full report is available on the European Commission´s website.