Participation in global work on implementationguidelines on "Societal engagement with science "for the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation
September 2022
Context
The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science was endorsed in November 2021. This recommendation is extensive and supports many aspects of open science practice, such as requiring scientists to publish their results as open access, or the need for an infrastructure that will support the sharing of data. Its importance lies in the fact that it has been ratified by 193 member states of UNESCO and therefore this recommendation can be used when approaching research funding organisations, universities, and policy makers, as a means to encourage further endorsement, support, and funding for open science.
Within the Recommendation, there are two areas that are of high importance for the people who are interested in societal engagement with science - be it science communication, making lay, local, and traditional knowledge heard and used, and citizen/community science.
With the Recommendation now endorsed, UNESCO has turned their attention to implementation. To do that, different working groups were established by UNESCO. Which are: Open Science Capacity Building; Open Science Policies and Policy Instruments; Open Science Funding and Incentives; Open Science Infrastructures; and Open Science Monitoring Framework.
Through the participation of people from the Citizen Science and Open Science Community of Practice (CS&OS CoP) in these working groups, it became clear that currently the main focus in the Implementation working groups is towards open access and the need for new infrastructures. Without an extra effort those aspects concerned with wider societal engagement in science (which are half of the Recommendation) will be underrepresented in the Implementation guidelines. This is where the global citizen science community can provide information and shape the process, to ensure the Implementation of the Recommendation is balanced to reflect all the key original aims.
In consultation with UNESCO, the Community of Practice on Citizen Science and Open science of the CSGP (Citizen Science Global Partnership) and associates are setting out to research, gather resources and create documents and information to help respond to this identified need.
UNESCO have informed us that they are being asked for support from a number of countries as to how to begin their journey of opening science to society and engaging science with societal actors so we need to Identify successful approaches and mechanisms for demonstrating to policymakers HOW to progress citizen science into Policy and Practice. The CS&OS CoP will run a hybrid workshop on 5 October 2022 in Berlin (back to back with the ECSA conference) as an introduction to policy-makers from countries who have not as yet advanced far down the path of developing citizen science into policy and practice.
Work plan
The UNESCO Open Science office has invited the CS&OS CoP and other interested actors and communities to develop guidance documentation. According to the UNESCO Open Science timelines, they are asking for some information by Mid October 2022, and then for final documents by the end of 2022. In discussion with them, we have identified four themes for which we are asking people to volunteer and assist us in development of these documents. We need to have representations from across the world and diverse organisations and backgrounds to be inclusive, and we are welcoming the inclusion of views from related areas of activities.
We have identified three themes around which we suggest that people will join their efforts.
Theme one: Creating a common, functional vocabulary and conceptualization of open engagement with societal actors and historically underrepresented knowledge systems, including, but not limited to, citizen science.
Within this theme, we would like to include museums and science centres (ASTC https://www.astc.org/ in the USA, ECSITE in Europe etc.) as well as people who are doing deliberative processes, such as citizen’s assemblies.
Theme two: Showcasing practical examples of success: What do supportive enabling conditions look like? What does a successful initiative look like, in which context? And examples of citizen science in policy. This is linked to theme three, and needs to work in tandem, but repositories of case studies can be reused for this purpose.
Theme three: Identifying principles for initiating, nurturing/sustaining and (potentially) monitoring open engagement, citizen science, etc. This task will require data collection and synthesis with people in different regions, and the report from that can be targeted also as a paper.
Our timelines and plans are:
● CS&OS CoP Workshop on How to progress Opening Science to Society into policy - 2 - 4pm, 5th October 2022, Natural History Museum Berlin
● Sep-Dec 2022: Groups working on each Theme working on line, coordination by email
Call for participation
We are calling for members of the CS&OS CoP, but also inviting people from other areas to join us in developing this response. Please indicate your interest to join this effort, and indicate what you can do and when, and which theme(s) you are interested in.
Citizen Science and Open Science Community of Practice, Citizen Science Global Partnership
Libby Hepburn, Uta Wehn, Jack Nunn, Muki Haklay