Day 3

The workshop is organized by the German Commission for UNESCO. It aims to share practical experiences on key success factors for Open Science in Africa. The participants will be invited to report on practical examples. The number of participants is limited to 60. Please use the ticket type „Open Science Conference including UNESCO Workshop“ during registration if you want to participate.

A detailed workshop description can be found here.

For questions about the workshop, please contact Fatma Rebeggiani (Rebeggiani@unesco.de).

This talk will summarise work done within the EC Horizon2020 project ON-MERRIT (2019-2022, https://on-merrit.eu/) to investigate risks of cumulative advantage in the transition to Open Science. Open Science holds the promise to make scientific endeavours more inclusive, participatory, understandable, accessible, and re-usable for large audiences. However, making processes open will not per se drive wide re-use or participation unless also accompanied by the capacity (in terms of knowledge, skills, financial resources, technological readiness and motivation) to do so. These capacities vary considerably across regions, institutions and demographics. Those advantaged by such factors will remain potentially privileged, putting Open Science’s agenda of inclusivity at risk of propagating conditions of “cumulative advantage”. Since 2019, the EC Horizon2020 project ON-MERRIT has been investigating these issues using scientometric, sociological and other approaches to examine how these factor influence the ways in which Open Science is taken up (and by whom). As ON-MERRIT concludes, this talk will showcase diverse findings across areas including OA publishing, rewards and incentives and participatory methods. I then concludes by presenting recommendations to mitigate threats co-created with the Open Science community.

Whilst many funders and publishers require or encourage researchers to share data underlying publications, the same cannot be said for code, which is also vital for reproducibility and transparency of research. We surveyed researchers in computational biology disciplines to understand if the community would support a mandatory code sharing policy, and their experiences with code sharing. Respondents (n=214) reported that, on average, 71% of their research articles have associated code, and that on average, code has not been shared for 32% of these articles. The most common reasons for not sharing code were practical issues (e.g. lack of time) and intellectual property concerns were cited by 22%. Overall, respondents reported they were on average more likely to submit to the journal if it had a mandatory code sharing policy, although Medicine and Health scientists and senior researchers viewed the proposed policy less favourably. A stronger code sharing policy has since been introduced at PLOS Computational Biology and this talk will discuss the learnings from the survey and the impact of the stronger code sharing policy implemented at the journal.

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