Driving Open Science adoption with a global framework: the Open Science Monitoring Initiative - The Official PLOS Blog

"Earlier this month the Open Science Monitoring Initiative shared a draft of Open Science monitoring principles, launching a worldwide consultation. 

We’re proud to have collaborated on the draft, drawing from our experience developing Open Science Indicators and building upon our participation alongside other nonprofit Open Science advocates, research organizations and policy-makers in a workshop hosted by UNESCO last December that initiated this effort. We are excited to see this important effort move forward in a forum that invites the participation of the broadest range of stakeholders from the scholarly community. 

Any organization that promotes Open Science, like PLOS, needs to be able to monitor the adoption of Open Science practices. Context is important. Research is a global enterprise supported by a vast network of academic institutions, service and infrastructure providers, funders, and policy-making groups. The solutions we build have to be able to address the priorities and answer the questions each of those groups are asking. So far, this has led to the emergence of a variety of monitoring solutions that are not comparable. This limits the utility of data collected in different contexts and importantly it risks creating misalignments. 

In our efforts to drive Open Science forward, we have first-hand experience of the barriers researchers face when the bodies that govern research culture and practice lack alignment. This is why the work of this group is so important: it will take a multi-stakeholder collaboration to drive context-specific but comparable monitoring solutions to support pathways to Open Science adoption for diverse communities...."