A Collection of Open Science Use Cases on Societal Engagement

2022 OPEN SCIENCE AWARDS

In the context of the Netherlands National Open Science Festival 2022 a call for Use Cases for the Open Science Awards was published, allowing all researchers and Phd students from Dutch universities, universities of applies sciences, UMCs and research institutes to submit their use case. The Open Science Awards recognise and reward researchers or research students who have used Open Science to make their research more accessible, transparent or reproducible.

This collection of Use Cases is the result of this call.

In 2022 the focus of the Awards lied on Societal Engagement, one of the key pillars of Open Science. The call was looking for use cases that explored challenges and difficulties as well as positive experiences and successful outcomes.

As defined in the UNESCO Recommendations for Open Science, societal engagement and the engagement of societal actors refers to “extended collaboration between scientists and societal actors beyond the scientific community, by opening up practices and tools that are part of the research cycle and by making the scientific process more inclusive and accessible to the broader inquiring society based on new forms of collaboration and work such as crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and scientific volunteering.”

Methods for achieving societal engagement can include:

• Citizen and community involvement in the generation of knowledge;

• Dialogue between scientists, policymakers and practitioners, entrepreneurs and community members during the research process such that they can voice their concerns, needs and aspirations;

• Citizen science and the co-creative participation of citizens or societal partners at any stage of the research process;

• Inclusion of other knowledge systems, lay knowledge or traditional knowledge within the research process.

All use cases in this collection included at least one out of these methods. The Festival programme committee awarded five use cases with an award; all of those winners made an extensive effort to open up their research practices that are part of the research cycle, making their scientific process more inclusive by doing so.

More information

More info about the National Open Science Festival, organised within the context of the National Programme Open Science can be found at http://www.opensciencefestival.nl