UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science—Some Thoughts

Thanos Giannakopoulos
Chief, United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library
Department of Global Communications

UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science is a landmark standard-setting instrument adopted by 193 UNESCO member states. It offers a much-needed universal definition of open science and its suite of practices, as well as a set of shared values and guiding principles. The Recommendation addresses inequality of access to the benefits of scientific progress between and among countries. Among other recommendations, it urges member states to set up regional and international funding mechanisms for open science, to invest in related open infrastructures, to develop an enabling policy environment for open science—including a responsible research evaluation and assessment practice and related cultural change—and to promote international and multi-stakeholder cooperation to reduce digital, technological, and knowledge gaps. The Recommendation asks UNESCO member states to report on their progress every 4 years.

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science is a long-awaited, great first step. In a society that manifests the pathology of data misuse, heightens barriers to accessing scientific output, and allows the overconcentration of data-aggregating powers at the hands of purely commercial platforms lacking the checks and balances of democratic, public institutions, there are some necessary next steps imminently needed.

• A framework to align the reporting of progress made in UNESCO member states on all fronts of open science policymaking and practices. When advancing the visionary agenda for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nations encouraged the creation of the global indicator framework for the SDGs, which was developed by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs). The framework was complemented by 231 unique indicators at the regional and national levels, used currently by UN member states to voluntarily and annually report on implementation progress.

• National and international discussion and regulation to disaggregate data. Make input/output of data and its analysis for decision making and dissemination more transparent. Ensure disaggregation of data collecting, analysis,  preservation and communication by detailed subcategories, a process complementary to the above-motioned framework, and especially by minoritized and marginalized groups, gender, language, age, diversity, assigned bibliometrics, access rights locally, regionally, nationally and internationally and more.

• Open science is not just a top-down movement. Importantly, it is also a bottom-up movement. Fostering a culture change to fully support open science principles requires a change at every researcher’s workbench. Changing research assessment and evaluation—the mechanisms that propagate the existing inequitable and archaic structures in scholarly communications—is paramount. The current system enhances gender and geographic research output asymmetries and is based on proxy measures controlled by corporate publishers and actors external to research, who do not legally abide by the principle of scientific output for the public good. Thus, the human right to enjoy and benefit from scientific progress is obstructed. An open instrument to fundamentally change scientific publishing and ensure the furthering of open access principles is needed. By concentrating national and international effort fairly on achieving equality of opportunity as well as equality of outcome for the young researcher looking to advance their career, by pursuing open synergies among academia, libraries, publishers, and policy makers, a more equitable science-policy-society interface can be accomplished.

• Democratically designed and governed digital platforms for knowledge discovery, capture, and preservation, treating scientific outputs as a public good, must be urgently pursued, both from the bottom up (practice/design/use) and from the top down (conceptualization/design/regulation). The UN Secretary-General, in his report Our Common Agenda, unfolds his vision for the future of global cooperation, reinvigorating inclusive, networked, and effective multilateralism. He writes, “We need to improve the protection of the global commons and the provision of a broader set of global public goods, those issues that benefit humanity as a whole and that cannot be managed by any one state or actor alone.”

A discussion on these and several other related points took place in the last, 2nd UN Open Science Conference in July 2021; the summary is available here.