Logo of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
Logo of UNESCO, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain

So far, we have examined the motivations for doing open science, and why we should share the process in its entirety. For the rest of this course, we still need a working definition of open science. For this, we turn to the official Recommendation on Open Science that is being drafted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Notably, citizen science practitioners have contributed to the creation of this document through the Citizen Science Global Partnership, which makes it particularly fitting for this course.

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science [1] is a long document to be ratified in late 2021 as a set of principles for member states to adopt. Formally, it defines open science as:

“…an inclusive construct that combines various movements and practices aiming to make scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone, to increase scientific collaborations and sharing of information for the benefits of science and society, and to open the processes of scientific knowledge creation, evaluation and communication to societal actors beyond the traditional scientific community. It includes all scientific disciplines and aspects of scholarly practices, including basic and applied sciences, natural and social sciences and the humanities, and it builds on the following key pillars: open access to scientific knowledge, open science infrastructures, open science communication, open engagement of societal actors and open dialogue with other knowledge systems.”

This is a long definition, which for the purposes of this course we will focus on its intent to:

“[…open] scientific contents, tools and processes based on increased reproducibility, transparency, sharing and collaboration” [1].

With this in mind, the following sections will explore the different outputs from your citizen science project that could be published as open science. This will be followed by a reflection on how citizen science has pioneered many open science processes, and how the methods and tools you learned can help with that.

Reference

1. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2021). Draft text of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (CL/4363; p. 18). United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000378381

Last modified: Wednesday, 20 October 2021, 3:30 PM