Joseph, H. (2021): Building momentum to realign incentives to support Open Science. Data Intelligence 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1162/dint_a_00079
The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the urgent need to strengthen global scientific collaboration, and to ensure the fundamental right to universal access to scientific progress and its applications. Open Science is central to achieving these goals. It aims to make science accessible, transparent, and effective by providing barrier-free access to scientific publications, data, and infrastructure, along with open software, open educational resources, and open technologies. Open Science also promotes public trust in science at a time when it has never been more important to do so. Over the past decade, momentum towards the widespread adoption of Open Science practices has been primarily driven by declarations (e.g., DORA, the Leiden Manifesto). These serve an important role, but for Open Science to truly take root, researchers also must be fully incentivized and rewarded for its practice. This requires research funders and academic leaders to take the lead in collaborating, with researchers in designing, and implementing new incentive structures, and to actively work to socialize these throughout the research ecosystem. The U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and (NASEM) Roundtable on Aligning Research Incentives for Open Science is one such effort. This paper examines the strategy behind convening the Roundtable, its current participant makeup, focus, and outputs. It also explores how this approach might be expanded and adapted throughout the global open science community.