Jo Havemann

It is commonly acknowledged that disparities and inequities exist with regards to research capacity and efficiency in research output dissemination due to historical reasons, prestige and privilege, access to funding or the lack thereof. The UNESCO Open Science recommendation report and toolkit provide tangible approaches to overcome existing barriers and point towards existing best practices, tools, and services to foster global equity in a scholarly ecosystem.

Besides providing access to research literature by removing paywalls and for many unaffordable subscription plans to scholarly databases, it is crucial to design scholarly infrastructure on a local, regional and global level in such a way that it allows authority and control to data ownership and curation, provides pathways for proactive participation in global scholarly knowledge exchange through data and research article dissemination, and enables any researcher and research consortium from any part of the world to access computing capacities to run their region-specific data analyses that are becoming increasing practice for currently only few scholarly stakeholders in privileged institutions and parts of the world.

This presentation will provide an overview of opportunities and challenges with an increasing uptake of Open Science practices to foster global research equity by possibly creating new challenges to the research community, which – if addressed early on, can be mitigated along the way.