Openness Profile: Defining the Concepts

The interest of Knowledge Exchange is to help reap the benefits of open, more transparent and collaborative research approaches by using the opportunities that information technology has to offer. Since 2005, our activities have explored how Open Access and Open Science, (a movement which is also known as open scholarship or open research as its scope has reached beyond physical, natural and social sciences), can best deliver their promise.

We’ve recently addressed Open Scholarship at conceptual level, resulting in the KE Open Scholarship Framework and the book ‘The Economy of Open Scholarship and the Need for Collective Action’. In parallel we collected use cases of initiatives and services that aim to contribute to Open Scholarship, focusing primarily on the economic challenges they face in a rapidly changing digitised research landscape. Outcomes of this work are published in ‘Insights into the Economy of Open Scholarship: A Collection of Interviews’.

This report documents an investigation into the need for and value of new evaluation approaches of people conducting open scholarship and their outputs. The report provides an extensive overview of strategies, barriers, and community needs regarding openness and explores what contributions an Openness Profile, as introduced in this report, can make to enable desired openness and fairer assessment in research. Examples are the recognition of contributions that traditionally have not been credited, appreciation of ‘different’ research outputs such as software, and actionable information on infrastructure requirements.

Activities to support the development of the Openness Profile will continue in the coming year. The objective is to bring stakeholders together to proof the concept of Openness Profile in various environments. The result we aim for is a body of knowledge, a mature concept, experiences, as well as a set of recommendations on how the Openness Profile could best be implemented in research practice.

We are aware there is still a long way to go. By sharing the rich findings of the first part of the work we hope to inspire and encourage you in your approaches towards improving openness in research.