Recommendations on Open Science Rewards and Incentives: Guidance for multiple stakeholders in Research.

Open Science contributes to the collective building of scientific knowledge and societal progress. However, academic research currently fails to recognise and reward efforts to share research outputs. Yet it is crucial that such activities be valued, as they require considerable time, energy, and expertise to make scientific outputs usable by others, as stated by the FAIR principles. To address this challenge, several bottom-up and top-down initiatives have emerged to explore ways to assess and credit Open Science activities (e.g., Research Data Alliance, RDA) and to promote the assessment of a broad spectrum of research outputs, including datasets and software (e.g., Coalition for Advancement of Research Assessment, CoARA). As part of the RDA-SHARC (SHAring Rewards and Credit) interest group, we have developed a set of recommendations to help implement various rewarding schemes at different levels. The recommendations target a broad range of stakeholders. For instance, institutions are encouraged to provide digital services and infrastructure, organise training and cover expenses associated with making data available for the community. The funders should establish policies requiring open access to data produced by funded research and provide corresponding support. The publishers should favour open peer-review models and open access to articles, data and software. Government policymakers should set up a comprehensive Open Science strategy, as recommended by UNESCO and followed by a growing number of countries. The present work details different measures that are proposed to the stakeholders. The need to include sharing activities in research evaluation schemes as an overarching mechanism to promote Open Science practices is specifically emphasised.

RDA-SHARC’s recommendations are meant to be adopted by researchers and the various stakeholders of the research environment and evaluation system in order to enable rewarding schemes for open science activities. The objective is to fill the gaps between the current OS activities and the recognition system. The ultimate goal is to foster and facilitate open science practice in all scientific communities.

We believe that our research output emphasising the need to seamlessly integrate Open Science practices in research evaluation and rewarding schemes is particularly associated with two Sustainable Development Goals: Reduced Inequality and Partnerships for the Goals.

Reduced Inequality: Our recommendations aim to address the inequalities that are linked to current evaluation and reward systems, driven by narrow and inappropriate definitions of research excellence.

Partnerships for the Goals: Our recommendations encourage cooperation between multiple stakeholders to share knowledge, expertise and resources for implementing rewards and recognition for Open Science practices. These practices, when properly incentivised and widely adopted, have the potential to accelerate progress across a broader scope of Sustainable Development Goals.

Mabile, L., Shmagun, H., Erdmann, C., Cambon-Thomsen, A., Thomsen, M., Grattarola, F., & RDA Sharing Rewards and Credit (SHARC) IG. (2024). Recommendations on Open Science Rewards and Incentives: Guidance for multiple stakeholders in Research. Research Data Alliance. https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA/000117