The Openness Profile: an infrastructure approach to recognizing and rewarding contributions to Open Scholarship

Recent prioritization of openness in European research policy links science to society in ways that endeavor to strengthen and propel the EU’s contributions to the global community. With the scale of this vision, it is not surprising to encounter a few obstacles in the course of implementation. In this presentation, we address one these obstacles: the (mis)alignment between the principles of openness outlined in research policy and the research evaluation protocols that play an important role in the governance of research practices. We introduce the Openness Profile concept[1] as a resource for both researchers and evaluators.

Within the community of policy makers and advocates of open scholarship, there is increasing awareness that (a) better recognition and reward of openness practices is a necessary condition for broad adoption of open scholarship, (b) top-down guidance, which is aimed at a wide range of disciplinary practices, will require substantial cultural change to shift the priority of research evaluation toward principles of open scholarship and (c) bottom-up openness initiatives and practices must emerge from local contexts to enable relevant, sustainable change.

Our aim in this endeavor is to provide complementary bottom-up resources linked to contemporary Research Information infrastructure. We propose an Openness Profile for making visible and being recognized for one’s contributions to open scholarship. There are three observations embedded in this proposal. First, enacting increased openness in scholarship relies on many different kinds of roles, many of which would not be included as an author of a published paper. Second, many of the contributions to openness are invisible to contemporary research evaluation protocols. And third, it is still an open question of what is specifically entailed in doing open scholarship.

Conceptually, the openness profile is conceived as a format for documenting contributions to open scholarship, procedures for self- publishing these contributions as a digital object with a persistent identifier, and strategic use of contemporary research information infrastructure to establish prominent placement of the published contributions. This latter point, linking to infrastructure, is intended to ensure both human findability and machine readability of the openness profile. More concretely, we envisage the openness profile as a collection of documented contributions (with a DOI), which is linked to the contributor’s ORCID iD. By intervening at the level of infrastructure, the openness profile is situated to provide resources that are useful to those presently contributing to open scholarship while also being available for, and adaptable to, future changes enacted by top-down research policy initiatives.

In an increasingly crowded space for author IDs, “ORCID is widely seen as the emerging de facto standard”. When linking an openness profile to one’s ORCID[2], it becomes findable and human-readable on the ORICD website and machine-readable by connected services, such as: a grant application platform, an institutional CRIS, and by some publisher platforms. In this way, the openness profile provides a means for recognizing contributions (and contributors) to open scholarship while at the same generating empirical evidence for what’s specifically entailed in making scholarship open.

[1] the Openness Profile is presently under development by the Knowledge Exchange working group on Open Scholarship and Research Evaluation -http://knowledge-exchange.info
[2] At present, we are working with ORICD and ARDC (RAiD) on a potential pilot program for the openness profile. See for example: “Openness Profile: Mobilizing PIDs to Increase Visibility of Open Scholarship.”https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2549270.