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Open Science Monitoring: a strategic priority for OpenAIRE

scholarly communication infrastructure policies & funders

12 Jan 2022

Monitoring the progress of Open Science is one of the five strategic priorities for OpenAIRE identified by the Open Science Strategies Standing Committee (OSS SC) in early 2021.

written by Eloy Rodrigues, Director of the University of Minho Libraries and OpenAIRE Executive Board Member

Recognizing the increasing importance of the topic and the growing number of initiatives related to monitoring being developed at institutional, regional, national, European and global levels, the OSS SC has organized an internal workshop in November 2021, for OpenAIRE AMKE members only, on Open Science Monitoring and Indicators.

The aim of the workshop was twofold.

On the one hand the goal was to collect and share information about the various initiatives related to Open Science monitoring and indicators that are being developed and planned in several European countries, not only to raise awareness of the different scopes and approaches being used and planned, but also to identify common issues and possible solutions, and stimulate collaboration. The presentations from eight countries (the case of France was not presented, but slides were made available afterwards) showed a wide diversity of initiatives in scope and focus (focused on research data, gold OA, author identifiers, or with a broad scope encompassing different dimensions and outputs), in the way data is collected (quantitative and qualitative data, manual and automatic data collection, etc.), in data types and sources, but also revealed some common challenges related with the quality and the exhaustiveness or completeness of the data.

On the other hand, the workshop was also an opportunity to present an update on the work, the tools and services of OpenAIRE (especially the OpenAIRE Graph and the Open Science Observatory) and to discuss the role of OpenAIRE and its services in this area. From the discussion, during and after the workshop, it was made clear that there is an important opportunity to connect the OpenAIRE Graph with national or local systems and initiatives, with significant mutual benefits. The Graph can be one central data source for national monitor systems (CRIS or another type). And simultaneously, the Graph can benefit from enriched and curated information from the national systems (for instance, author institutional/national affiliation information linked to publications). A two-way relation between the Open Science Observatory and national initiatives was also mentioned as worth exploring.

Following the workshop, which confirmed the strategic importance and the opportunities and challenges for OpenAIRE in this domain, the Open Science Strategies Standing Committee has proposed to the Executive Board to establish an Open Science Monitoring Task Force to continue, deepen and further expand the work, bringing together OpenAIRE AMKE members and people from the OpenAIRE technical team.

What's next?

The Task Force creation will be submitted to the AMKE General Assembly in January and, once approved, interested AMKE members are invited and welcome to join. Stay tuned!

See work already in progress

OpenAIRE is already working to produce various OS monitoring services, based on the OpenAIRE Research Graph:

Open Science Observatory tracking open science proxy indicators by country.
Monitoring Dashboards for Funding Agencies and Research Institutions
European Open Science Observatory (as part of the EOSC Future project in collaboration with Technopolis Group, the EOSC Association and the EOSC Steering Group).