OPEN SCIENCE: THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PUBLIC ACTION
The Bi-regional Conference on open access to research results took place on 6-7 June 2023 and initiated a process of dialogue on policy between the European Union (EU) and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This online meeting was organised by the European Commission (EC) and hosted representatives of the main open science initiatives from both regions, authorities from Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Spain, France, Panama, Peru, Portugal and Uruguay, as well as the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research and Innovation and the External Policy Instruments Service.
The purpose of the conference was for key actors involved in the design and deployment of public action on open science in the EU and LAC countries to meet, share their experiences, gain a better mutual understanding of current policies in both regions, and identify opportunities for collaboration and harmonisation of their open science strategies. Seemingly, a complex objective to articulate. To facilitate this work, attendees had a very useful travel guide: the independent expert report Open Access Policies in Latin America, Caribbean and the European Union: Progress towards a political dialogue. This detailed work, co-authored by Laura Bonora and myself, concisely describes the regional open science initiatives, the legal basis, governance and institutional architecture of the national science, technology and innovation (STI) systems of eleven LAC and EU countries and their policies for open access to research publications and data, identifies common challenges, and delves into concrete recommendations for policy measures. This background report made it easier for participants in the bi-regional conference to position each other within the global STI ecosystem and to have a common narrative on which to start the discussion.
The European Union looks towards Latin America and the Caribbean
At first sight, an event organised by the EC to find out about LAC’s reality and harmonise positions may have a certain echo of bureaucratic colonialism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout the world, R&D policies are influenced by the open science paradigm. A proper approach to the challenges they face requires large-scale discussions and the establishment of mechanisms to coordinate concrete actions. And when it comes to changing science systems, the uncertainties are always the same. In this case, the dialogue was held in a context where there was already strategic alignment and common understanding. The two regions have developed coherent policies, funded infrastructures that are comparable in purpose and technical design, and promoted similar actions in favour of open science. The bi-regional conference gave the opportunity to take a close look at the functioning of such paradigmatic initiatives in the LAC region such as LA Referencia, Redalyc-AmeliCA, SciELO, Latindex y CLACSO-FOLEC, and to establish parallels and common points with actions promoted or supported by the EC such as EOSC, OpenAIRE, DIAMAS, ORE and CoARA. Both regions had the opportunity to contrast the high level of homogeneity of their decision-making agendas, their open science policies and the digital infrastructures on which they are based, to understand their success and to assess their scalability.
Public action parallels
The debate focused on the report's recommendations. Firstly, it was important to recognise that STI systems in both regions have varying levels of institutional stability and economic support, and that the governance and funding of science systems in LAC need to be strengthened so that the deployment of public actions can have the desired effects. To achieve this, apart from actions to disseminate good practices and to ensure economic stability and the coverage of multi-annual funding programmes for R&D&I activities in the countries of the region, the Horizon Europe (HE) programme was mentioned repeatedly as an essential element in the EU-LAC collaboration. Furthermore, the role of the Spanish national contact points (NCPs) was emphasised as key to fostering LAC participation in European consortia. In this context, the fact that Spain will hold the Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of 2023 and that strengthening relations with LAC is one of its strategic priorities, was highlighted as a contributing factor to this action.
During the second part of the debate, the sharing of challenges in the design and deployment of open access policies, was very rich. All countries referred to the same problems and the barriers to fostering change: uncertainty, incentives, training and assessment were the words most repeated by the EC representatives and the countries that are leading change in LAC. Besides this recognition of difficulties, one of the direct consequences of this dialogue was that countries without open access policies and open science strategies realised that they did not look good in the picture. Public decision-makers often attend urgent before important issues until a spark makes them look at the situation with different glasses. On this occasion, the negative comparison took effect almost immediately and, following the conference, there were signs of moves to expand the coverage of open access policies in the region which is very encouraging.
The conversation continued by looking at open science digital infrastructures in both regions and contrasting the similarities and complementarities between them. The role of repositories is central to LAC and EU policies. To strengthen them, LA Referencia and OpenAIRE are developing a quality certification and content visualisation role that has shared objectives and was developed in parallel over time. Besides, LAC countries are well ahead of the EU in supporting diamond academic journals. Apart from their technical divergences, the differences between their two major initiatives were clearly stated. Redalyc-AmeliCA has a strong position towards knowledge as a public good, it defends the model of non-commercial academic publishing, provides direct services to journals which it considers communities of knowledge and advocates for sustained public funding. SciELO has a fluid relationship with publishers and commercial service providers and has developed a strategy based on support for national collections. New initiatives in Europe, the OPERAS infrastructure and the DIAMAS project, took good note of the strategic dilemmas and paradoxes they will have to face in the near future, and made a strong case that digital infrastructures shape policy design. This was clearly exemplified by the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the European ecosystem for the generation, curation, storage, long-term preservation, federation, governance, reuse and assessment of research data, which overwhelmed the audience with its impressive amount of public funding (500 million euros in the Horizon 2020 programme and 500 million euros in the Horizon Europe programme) and the still incipient level of development of its services. To their amazement, the offer to extend the model - and even the infrastructure itself - was welcomed by the LAC community.
The high point of the discussion came with the reform of research assessment systems. The understanding and twinning between CLACSO-FOLEC and CoARA was evident, and the debate welcomed with a wave of optimism proposals made for the promotion of open access, the inclusion of all research outputs and the measurement of social impact in the research assessment process. One of the objectives of the bi-regional conference was fulfilled as the two initiatives recognised each other as equals and steered the conversation towards immediate and future collaborative actions. To conclude, two of countries already working on these reforms, Peru and Spain, brought a note of realism and attested the difficulties they are experiencing in implementing high-level strategic decisions at a practical level.
Small steps for a long vision
The EU and the LAC region are experiencing a historic moment of political and economic convergence. The adoption of the New Agenda for EU-Latin America and Caribbean Relations adopted by the EU institutions on 7 June 2023 and the EU-CELAC Summit held on 17-18 July 2023 provide a large-scale political context that legitimises the implementation of collaborative and cooperative actions on such a concrete - and complex - issue as open science.
Both regions have common challenges that shows the need to bring together their approaches to the public problem and actions to solve it through mutual learning strategies. A right articulation of these processes requires the specialised knowledge of professionals on the ground, whose ability to decode high-level messages for lower levels decision-makers is essential. A technical command of complex issues and a correct understanding of public action tools and timing is necessary for identifying key interlocutors, articulating dialogue and driving decision-making.
On this occasion, the long vision of high-level declarations and staging has benefited from those of us who provide services to public administrations by deploying actions that have been outlined by a higher hierarchy and from our very vast capacity to take small, very small steps that have an impact on the ground in the right direction.
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Please click here to see the Spanish version
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Pilar Rico-Castro
21 July 2023
Pilar Rico-Castro is head of the open access, repositories and journals unit at the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) and associate professor at the National University of Distance Education (UNED). She is co-author, together with Laura Bonora, of the report Open Access Policies in Latin America, the Caribbean and the European Union. Advances for a policy dialogue, published by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research and Innovation in March 2023
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-pilar-rico-castro-a0424517/
Twiter: @Pilaricocastro