researcher Congress

[Glenn Hampson]

Folks,

 

Thanks to those of you who volunteered to participate in the upcoming OSI2022 Researcher Congress in July. We’re going to have a good group---about 100 from round one of the survey, plus about a dozen OSI-connected researchers, 20 highly cited researchers (including one Nobel laureate) recruited through direct outreach, and possibly more from a different survey that CACTUS/Editage will (hopefully) be able to administer globally in the coming weeks.

 

As a prelude to this engagement, several OSIers are working on three key items:

 

1. A concise and referenced summary of what we already know about researcher attitudes writ large
2. A high-level (and not overly specific) description of research communication goals that encompasses BOAI, DORA, Leiden, etc., and
3. A very rough draft of what a policy built on 1 and 2 might look like (see the text below my signature for an example and possible starting point).

 

I would also like to start discussing with you what you think we should ask this group of researchers. We will have five opportunities for engagement---one email per week for each week of July, plus one email in September after the dust has settled and we’re looking for feedback on the final summary document. We can post four different surveys to this group with multiple choice questions, ask open ended questions about things like needs and priorities, etc.---it’s all open for discussion. Ideally, we would like the answers from this esteemed group to help fill in gaps in our understanding and help point us toward a research communication policy solution that UNESCO and others can build upon---something that represents the collected work of OSI but also broadly incorporates researcher feedback and other existing policies, with enough flexibility that this action plan can be built upon and not just be a stand-alone aspirational statement. Make sense? (Again, see below for a starting point.)

 

Thanks again and best regards,

 

Glenn

 

 

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

 

 

POSSIBLE STARTING POINT FOR RESEARCH COMMUNICATION POLICY:

 

The OSI2022 Research Congress, meeting virtually in July 2022,

 

Recognizing the importance of research to the future of humankind,

 

Considering there are a wide variety of research fields in the world today, each with unique needs and perspectives,

 

Acknowledging that researchers, research institutions and global regions everywhere are not equal with regard to their ability to participate in or reap the benefits from research,

 

Committed to ensuring that that future of research communication is both effective and more equitable, and,

 

Building on the work of the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI), which has been engaged in partnership with UNESCO since 2015 to build such an effective and equitable framework for the future of global research communication, and building as well on the numerous efforts with related goals, such as DORA, FAIR, BOAI, the Leiden Manifesto, and the Lindau Guidelines (see footnote 1 for details),

 

Together resolve that research should adopt these 10 policy goals for research communication---that researchers everywhere should:

1. Follow and help improve established best practices regarding the ethical conduct of research (as outlined in existing legal frameworks, institutional guidance, and more). This is relevant to research communication insofar as faulty research that gets published and publicized, that uses forged data or fake analysis, or that plagiarizes other research poses a threat to the research ecosystem.
2. Avoid publishing in fake and predatory journals, which lack adequate safeguards to ensure the work they publish is of sufficient integrity.
3. Make research work readily available and discoverable to research peers worldwide to the extent possible (taking into account concerns such as competition, misuse). This goal is achievable through a variety of means, from publishing work in some type of “open” format (of which many varieties exist), to ensuring that data is included with work, to ensuring that old work doesn’t sit in file cabinets and null-hypothesis outcomes get published.
4. Support efforts to improve equity in research through improved access, through the recognition and reduction of funding and evaluation biases, and other means. As part of this effort, be aware that “one-size-fits-all” solutions crafted in the Global North (such as the author pays publishing charge) may actually harm equity and access for researchers in most parts of the world.
5. Support efforts to make research work more accessible to policy makers and the public through journalism, outreach, plain language abstracts, and other means.
6. Follow established best practices with regard to archiving and preserving the published research record.
7. Participate in reviewing and critiquing the work of peers worldwide (however these processes continue to evolve).
8. Evaluate research based on merit, not on its “impact”, or the “impact factor” of the journal in which research is published.
9. Support continuous efforts to improve research replicability, reliability and transparency.
10. Support efforts to improve the usability and reusability of research and research data (by means that include but are not limited to using more open licenses, sharing data through research networks and repositories, supporting data standards work, and more).

 

Signed and adopted this day _____