In a previous blog post we introduced the CWTS knowledge agenda 2023-2028. Building on this, in the current post we present the new focal areas in which CWTS organizes its activities. These focal areas address key challenges in the way science is practiced and governed, in particular challenges for which we believe our centre is uniquely positioned to make a difference and to contribute to transformative changes.

Academic research has become increasingly complex, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and transnational. The institutions that underpin research - including communication and evaluation systems - are trying to keep up, with varying levels of success. At the same time, our society is facing major challenges, including existential global health, welfare, and sustainability issues.

KU Leuven is now an inaugural supporting member of ResearchEquals, sustaining and governing the development of modular publishing. As part of their commitment to Open Science, KU Leuven supports sustainable implementations of Open Access and Open Science through the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA. The fund is usually only available to non-profits, but ResearchEquals’ governance convinced KU Leuven to support a for-profit initiative.

Fatou Bah, master’s student in the ScholCommLab, attended the 2023 Bromley Memorial event in Washington, D.C. alongside invited graduate students from the University of Ottawa (UOttawa). Organized by the UOttawa Institute for Science, Society & Policy (ISSP) and the George Washington University Institute for International Science &

💡 This is a post in a series of Stories From My PhD. For background on this series, read the announcement post. In 2017, I received a Mozilla Open Science Fellowship, which ended up becoming a career defining opportunity. I was able to expand my horizons beyond the academic statistics work I was doing, and started germinating ideas that, after cultivation, resulted in ResearchEquals. This fellowship, however, almost did not happen.

Tom Hostler has just published an article titled “The invisible workload of open research” in the Journal of Trial and Error’s special issue on the “Consequences of the scientific reform movement: Is the scientific reform movement headed in the right direction?” It’s an insightful and thought-provoking piece that uncovers the potential workload costs of open research, considers why these costs may be ignored by university management,

We are delighted to announce that the French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) has renewed its commitment to sustaining the activities of four SCOSS-selected infrastructures, including OpenCitations.

We (semi)recently shipped our integration Research Organization Registry (ROR) for ResearchEquals! ROR is the ORCID for institutions, allowing researchers to easily identify themselves as being affiliated to certain organizations. With this integration, ResearchEquals joins a league of other publishers who are increasing their commitment to complete metadata.

The December 2022 issue of the journal Industrial and Organizational Psychology includes a very interesting discussion of the pros and cons of open science. There’s a target article titled “Open science, closed doors: The perils and potential of open science for research in practice” (Guzzo et al., 2022) and nine commentaries on this article. You can find all 10 papers here.

The scientific community is moving towards a more transparent way of conducting and reporting research. Scientific publications are becoming more and more openly accessible but openness should also extend to peer review, preprinting, preregistration, data sharing, metadata availability, and related issues. Research funders and other stakeholders are putting a significant effort into promoting open science practices in scholarly communication.