The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science

Dr. Paul Ayris
Pro-Vice-Provost LCCOS (Library, Culture, Collections, Open Science)
Prof. Dr. Kurt Deketelaere
Secretary-General LERU 
Professor of Law KU Leuven, Chairman Sustainability College Bruges, visiting Professor of Law University of Helsinki 

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science presents an opportunity for a global move towards embracing open science principles and practice. For that reason alone, its appearance at the end of 2021 is to be welcomed.

Covid-19 presents enormous challenges to society across the globe, never more so than with the emergence of a new variant—omicron—that seems to be more transmissible than the Delta version of the virus.  In this context, it is vital for scientists around the globe to embrace open science principles for openness and sharing, to speed our ability to discover remedies and to develop vaccines. As UCL said in a public statement in 2021, Covid-19 “is a wakeup call to the global research community to finally adopt open science/open scholarship as a set of principles and values which should guide all future activity”.

The UNESCO Recommendation emphasizes the change of culture that is necessary amongst all stakeholders to embrace open science practice. This is the exact message that the LERU Rectors gave in the LERU Advice Paper of 2018: Open Science and its role in universities: a roadmap for cultural change. They said, “Open science … represents a culture change in the way stakeholders in the research, education and knowledge exchange communities create, store, share and deliver the outputs of their activity.”

The UNESCO Recommendation puts forward 7 areas of action that should be adopted:

These are all eminently sensible approaches to delivering the change in culture that the Recommendation advocates.

What are the drivers that will enable society to achieve these goals? The UNESCO document itself identifies one of the most persuasive, but challenging, ones: “Assessment of scientific contribution and career progression rewarding good open science practices is needed for operationalization of open science” (p. 27). There is a lot behind this sentence and, arguably, many see this issue as the key to changing behavior and practice by researchers and research-performing organizations. Pre-requisites include implementation of the San Francisco Declaration and the Leiden Manifesto, and acknowledgment that Journal Impact Factors are no measure for the academic quality of individual articles. In December 2021, LERU announced that its member universities want to do more justice to the wide range of expertise needed in research, and it has taken open science into account in its statement. It is important that UNESCO has added its considerable voice to the call for a re-alignment of the rewards system.

Is the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science novel and original? In fairness, it is not, because it builds on a considerable body of knowledge and learning that preceded it. What is important about the Recommendation is that it provides a single framework for the 193 UNESCO members to use as a road map. “Th[is] first international framework on open science was adopted by 193 countries attending UNESCO’s General Conference. By making science more transparent and more accessible, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science will make science more equitable and inclusive.”

 What next for UNESCO? Their Open Science Recommendation is detailed and thorough. How can it be translated into clear, positive action? When LERU faced the same challenge, the body issued a publication Open Science and its role in universities: a roadmap for cultural change, which contains 41 practical recommendations on what LERU members can choose to do to progress Open Science principle and practice. LERU continued its work with an internal Report looking at all the areas of Open Science and identifying those where more work was needed. One of the first fruits of this activity is the LERU Data Statement, which underlines the precarious position universities find themselves in as a result of the data deluge. The UNESCO paper identifies 7 key areas for future action and proposes a monitoring scheme to measure progress. This is to be welcomed, but is it enough to deliver the wholesale cultural change that Open Science requires? Only time will tell.