The Role of Research Managers in the Advocacy of Open Science

The transition to Open Science needs a cultural change across universities, research communities and funders in addition to new tools and infrastructure. Research managers have a high potential for enabling cultural change towards Open Science through their pivotal role within universities. With our poster, we want to shed light on the ways in which research managers can act as advocates for Open Science in order to support cultural change not only among researchers, but also in terms of organizational change and governance. Furthermore, we would like to outline how research managers should be trained accordingly and how they best fulfill their role in complement to experts e.g. from the library or IT-services. The objective should be to join forces and support each other.
For our poster, we refer to our experiences in the advocacy of open science practices at the Research and Innovation Services at Leibniz University Hannover (LUH). As appropriate training is a prerequisite for the support of Open Science practices, research managers at LUH together with their colleagues from the library have already attended trainings tailored to their role on the topics of Open Access and research data management. An essential part of the training is the sharing of expert knowledge of each professional group with the other. As current research assessment procedures do not align with Open Science objectives the use of responsible metrics will be added to the training program. There is a need for the further development of trainings and their professionalization as well as for more networking and exchange between librarians and research managers.