Workshop Report: Resilience in Times of Crisis - Strengthening Open Science Against Geopolitical Pressures – Research Group Information Management @ Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

"On November 6 2025, we participated in the Workshop “Resilience in Times of Crisis: Strengthening Open Science Against Geopolitical Pressures” at the CWTS in Leiden.

The workshop made reference to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (“UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science” 2021), which presented an extensive and inclusive vision for Open Science when they were published in 2021. In the geopolitical climate of 2025, the values in the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science are threatened. Throughout the day, 20-30 participants discussed influences of geopolitics on Open Science, areas that require (more) awareness, and strategies to make Open Science more resilient.

In her keynote, Lynda Kellam from the University of Pennsylvania Libraries introduced the Data Rescue Project. Following the keynote, invited speakers offered their thoughts on the resilience of Open Science practices and infrastructures. Hugh Shanahan from Royal Holloway, University of London talked about factors that can put preprint servers at risk: the strong involvement of US institutions and a reliance on commercial internet service providers. Molly Hardy from the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School introduced the Public Data Project, which applies curation practices to data rescue initiatives. Laura Rothfritz from our research group at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin presented results from her PhD thesis on the Data Rescue movement in 2017 and 2018 - read more about her contribution below. Joseph Gum discussed potential business models of open data infrastructures and risks associated with them. He also presented the Repository Crisis Scorecard, a tool that can be used to assess the resilience of a repository during a crisis. Jeroen Bosman from Utrecht University offered a categorization of threats to Open Science as well as strategies to increase resilience. His slides are published here."