Open science round-up: December 2022

This month's guest editorial looks at the next steps for the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science through 2023, and Jenice Goveas provides an overview of Open Science news from December in our regular monthly round-up.

Open science round-up: December 2022

One of the major Open Science stories of the past few years has been the development and adoption of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. Ana Peršić of UNESCO tells us what’s next for the Recommendation’s implementation:

“We enter this New Year 2023 conscious of the urgent need for a more equal, fair and just world. The acceleration of the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and the implementation of the milestone climate change and biodiversity agreements that marked 2022 have set the ambitious global agenda to ensure a better future for generations to come. To be able to deliver on this agenda, the recently held World Science Forum called for a more equal, fair and just science to make a critical contribution. The only way for science to play a more decisive role in ensuring that resources, opportunities and benefits in society are accessible to all and are distributed in a fair manner is by a strong commitment to Open Science – commitment by all actors in the science ecosystem to advancing accessibility, equity, collaboration, transparency, inclusion and trust in the production, communication and use of science.

Today, with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, negotiated and adopted in 2021 by 193 countries, we have a set of shared values and guiding principles, and a common roadmap to advance Open Science globally. Rallying behind and supporting the implementation of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science is an opportunity that cannot be missed.

To ensure that Open Science does not repeat the mistakes of the conventional closed science systems which have led to inequalities in participation in scientific processes and inequities in sharing of scientific progress and benefits, at UNESCO, we are working with multistakeholder Working Groups, open to all, to unpack key challenges and barriers in operationalizing open science, including its unintended consequences, across the world. In collaboration with the Working Groups and other partners, the UNESCO Open Science Toolkit is being produced to address these challenges and to support the implementation of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.

I would like to use this opportunity to invite the readers to use and disseminate the guides, factsheets and checklists contained in the Toolkit and to reiterate UNESCO’s invitation to the international scientific community through the Members of the International Science Council to join us in the work ahead.

Dr Ana Peršić is Programme Specialist at the Section of Science Technology Innovation Policy at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. An ecologist by training (Master in Ecological Sciences at the University of Padova, Italy and PhD in Ecotoxicology at the University of Paris South, France), Dr Ana Peršić joined UNESCO in April 2006 as Assistant Program Specialist serving the UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme within the Division of Ecological and Earth Sciences. She then served as Science Specialist at the UNESCO Liaison Office in New York from 2011 to 2018. Her work relates to strengthening the science-policy interface and the promotion of science technology and innovation in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Since 2019 her focus has been on open science – she coordinated the development of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and is currently working towards its implementation.

Big stories in Open Science:

The Push for peer-reviewed preprints gains momentum:

Newly launched SCOAP3 for Books gains the support of CERN:

PLOS to partner on preprints with EarthArXiv for 2023

Crowdsourced peer review in scholarly publishing

China releases report on Open Access publishing landscape:

Strengthening Diamond Open Access in Europe:

Report on the state of journal production and access 2022 published:

Kyrgyzstan taking strides towards Open Access

The Global Open Culture Call to Action for Policymakers

Open Science Events and Opportunities:

Job Opportunities:

Our top ten open science reads:

  1. Building Blocks for a Scholarly Blog Archive
  2. Factors that hinder and promote open science in ecology research and education
  3. How Africa is overcoming ‘knowledge colonialism’
  4. On the culture of open access: the Sci-hub paradox
  5. Zlibrary’s demise and its consequence – how things stand at the moment
  6. Adding equity to transformative agreements and journal subscriptions 
  7. ‘Peer Community In’ May Accomplish What Open Access Could Not
  8. Australia and New Zealand face bumpy road to open access research
  9. Why we need open-source science innovation — not patents and paywalls
  10. It’s time for Canada to adopt open access for taxpayer-funded research too

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Image by HamZa NOUASRIA on Unsplash.

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