Two international organizations have recently issued principled recommendations on open science. In May 2021 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) put out its draft Recommendation on Open Science which it expects to be adopted in November 2021. After a preamble that references past related works, the report then states its aims and objectives, provides a definition of open science and open scientific knowledge, outlines core values and guiding principles, details areas of action and concludes with advice on monitoring. UNESCO’s definition of open science is important because it is inclusive of all disciplines and knowledge systems:
…open science is defined as an inclusive construct that combines various movements and practices aiming to make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone, to increase scientific collaborations and sharing of information for the benefits of science and society, and to open the processes of scientific knowledge creation, evaluation and communication to societal actors beyond the traditional scientific community. It comprises all scientific disciplines and aspects of scholarly practices, including basic and applied sciences, natural and social sciences and the humanities, and it builds on the following key pillars: open scientific knowledge, open science infrastructures, science communication, open engagement of societal actors and open dialogue with other knowledge systems.
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The recommendation recognizes scientific publications, open research data, open educational resources, open source software and code, and open hardware as “open scientific knowledge.” Stated core values include quality and integrity, collective benefit, equity and fairness, and diversity and inclusiveness.
The International Science Council (ISC), a non-governmental organization that brings together 40 international and 140 national and regional scientific organizations, issued a comprehensive report in February 2020, “Opening the Record of Science: Making Scholarly Publishing Work For Science In The Digital Era” from which they’ve recently pulled and promoted Seven Principles of Scientific Publishing. The whole report chronicles for the scientific community dysfunctional scholarly publishing markets that are all too familiar to academic librarians. The 7 principles present common goals for a global public good to which the scientific community aspires:
- There should be universal open access to the record of science, both for authors and readers, with no barriers to participation, in particular those based on ability to pay, institutional privilege, language or geography.
- Scientific publications should carry open licences that permit reuse and text and data mining.
- Rigorous and ongoing peer review must continue to play a key role in creating and maintaining the public record of science.
- The data and observations on which a published truth claim is based should be concurrently accessible to scrutiny and supported by necessary metadata.
- The record of science should be maintained in such a way as to ensure open access by future generations.
- Publication traditions of different disciplines should be respected, while at the same time recognizing the importance of inter-relating their contributions in the shared enterprise of knowledge.
- Publication systems should be designed so as to continually adapt to new opportunities for beneficial change rather than embedding inflexible systems that inhibit change.
The UNESCO and ISC reports offer important benchmarks to guide the realization of knowledge creation that benefits local, national and global communities.
