Fiocruz facing the challenge of Open Science for Development and Public Health | SciELO in Perspective

"The role of science for development and quality of life alongside technological progress has always been an important issue. In the last decade, the scientific community, especially funding agencies, have been raising critical questions about how investments in science may contribute more effectively to the development of more equitable and sustainable societies. As a background for this discussion, the debate on limitations of current models of management and evaluation of research and teaching on guiding science to generate benefits for society that go beyond advances in scientific knowledge. The slogan of the European Community Research Program – Horizon2020, “for ‘the best science for the world’ and not just ‘the best science in the world’” expresses well this perception. The present research evaluation model induces quality science to be oriented towards a productivist logic based on quantitative metrics of scientific output. The debate on the misuse of bibliometric indicators and the need to expand the way of monitoring and evaluating science is expressed in recent manifestoes organized by the global scientific community, such as the Leiden Manifesto (2014 STI Conference), the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, 2012), and the Slow Science manifesto (2010 Slow Science Academy), among others. In Brazil, this debate has revolved around the Qualis system, which, in most areas of evaluation, simply transfers journal performance metrics, including the Impact Factor, as a measure of research assessment. Three other issues related to research communication that feed this debate refer to the need to improve the mechanisms that ensure the reproducibility of research results, the need to accelerate the communication of results openly through preprints and the question of ethics on research and its communication....

The appropriation of Open Science as a new model of research management is a challenging issue for Fiocruz. As a strategic public institution of the Brazilian State, acting in the field of Public Health in the promotion of the population’s health, reducing inequalities and social inequities, consolidating and strengthening the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS, Unified Health System), elaborating and improving public health policies, Fiocruz seeks to understand the formulation of an institutional policy on the possibilities, limits, challenges, potential damages and iniquities generated by the opening of data in interdisciplinary research on health determinants. With this objective, it has elaborated a matrix of strategic actions that will be implemented in the next years, which includes the definition of principles and institutional guidelines that favor the opening of data, the development of studies, application of Open Science practices in pilot projects and community empowerment in Open Science and Data Management...."