Open science at issue
International experts gather in Barcelona on October 4 and 5 to debate on and elaborate an Action Plan on Open Science, a guideline with best practices and innovating practices to encourage politicians and stakeholders to implement open science in Spain, like in other European countries such as Portugal and the Netherlands. The meeting is proposed by B·Debate, an initiative from Biocat and “la Caixa” Obra Social, in collaboration with the University of Barcelona throughout the CRAI.
International experts gather in Barcelona on October 4 and 5 to debate on and elaborate an Action Plan on Open Science, a guideline with best practices and innovating practices to encourage politicians and stakeholders to implement open science in Spain, like in other European countries such as Portugal and the Netherlands. The meeting is proposed by B·Debate, an initiative from Biocat and “la Caixa” Obra Social, in collaboration with the University of Barcelona throughout the CRAI.
Open science is a movement promoting an accessible science for everyone, which is efficient, reproducible and transparent. This change in paradigm will have consequences on the current way of finance and science, opening different steps of the research process (methods and open data, transparent assessment, citizen science, etc.).
Open science will have consequences in the publication of results. At the moment, journals with the highest impact for researchers, such as Nature and Science, require a payment from the reader. This barrier is against the actions open science promotes to share the newest results on research within the scientific community.
In these lines, last September, the European Commission, the European Research Council (ERC), and organizations from eleven European countries, among which Spain does not appear, presented the Plan S to promote open access of all studies supported by European funds, especially those that receive economics aids from ERC, before January 1, 2020.
In particular, this B•Debate will treat four key aspects of open science in different sessions and work groups that will work on the best practice proposals: open access; ethics, integrity and reproducibility of research; research assessment; and societyʼs involvement in scientific research.
This time, B·Debate is coorganized by five experienced institutions regarding this issue and which are involved in European responsible research and innovation projects (RRI): the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the University of Barcelona (UB), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), IrsiCaixa AIDS research institute, and the Barcelona Global Health Institute ISGlobal.
Link to B·Debate program “Open science: from values to practice. Building a roadmap for transformative change”.