The Principles of Open Science Monitoring

Update 2025-09-17: Finnish, German and Spanish versions added

To fully take advantage of the adoption of the 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, transparent and representative monitoring must be put in place to drive and support the intended change. It is also vital to identify effective actions and priority gaps.

To compensate for the lack of global guidelines on open science monitoring, the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research initially brought together a group of French experts (Université de Lorraine, Inria) to work on a proposal for common monitoring principles. This text served as a basis for a conference which gathered international experts at the Paris UNESCO headquarters in December 2023 (get access to the presentations), leading to the Open Science Monitoring Initiative (OSMI).

OSMI and UNESCO then conducted an international consultation to gather opinions from around the world to ensure that the Principles meet a variety of needs, approaches and contexts worldwide. In the past few months, the OSMI Initiators and the OSMI Coordination Committee have painstakingly integrated the feedback from more than 150 experts worldwide, from 41 countries on the five continents into the draft principles. We are now proud to announce the publication of the final internationally agreed upon version of the Principles of Open Science Monitoring.

These Principles focus on three key pillars: (1) relevance and significance, (2) transparency and reproducibility, and (3) self-assessment and responsible use. They have been drafted with differing stakeholder contexts, capacities, and resources in mind, consistently considering both qualitative and quantitative outputs and outcomes. Importantly, the Principles are not intended for assessing individual researchers. In addition, they are intended to be more aspirational than prescriptive. We hope that these Principles will serve as the framework of past and upcoming open science monitoring systems and will be endorsed worldwide.

About OSMI: https://open-science-monitoring.org/

This deposit is composed of:

• The Principles of Open Science Monitoring in English
• The Principles of Open Science Monitoring in Finnish
• The Principles of Open Science Monitoring in French
• The Principles of Open Science Monitoring in German
• The Principles of Open Science Monitoring in Spanish
• The references used to create the Principles
• The list of contributors who have endorsed this final version