Laura Rovelli - Coordinator, Latin American Forum for Research Assessment

The presentation introduces the state of scientific policies on open access and open science in Latin America and explores their impact on research assessment. It is based on a recent and exploratory study in eight countries of the region, where the approach to knowledge as a public good and open access managed by the academic community, not for profit, stands out. The role of publishers, institutional repositories, universities and science and technology agencies and councils is explored, whereas some of the key barriers to encourage change are identified. Last, the main issues and challenges for research assessment promoting openness, collaboration and participation in the production and circulation of knowledge in the region are discussed.

Laura Rovelli

Laura Rovelli coordinates since 2020 the Latin American Forum for Research Assessment (FOLEC, in Spanish) of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) and is a member of the Advisory Council of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Evaluation - DORA. Her work in FOLEC-CLACSO is aimed at consolidating a Latin American space for the transformation of academic evaluation policies and practices in the region. Currently, she coordinates a research project funded by IDRC on governance and evaluation from the allocation of research funds in the Global South. In 2020, she co-authored with Dominique Babini the book "Recent trends in open science and open access in science policy in Iberoamerica", published by CLACSO and Fundación Carolina and has been an observer representing CLACSO at the UNESCO intergovernmental meeting to elaborate a draft Recommendation on Open Science.

Laura Rovelli is a political scientist with a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires, adjunct researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and associate professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Educational Sciences of the National University of La Plata (UNLP) in Argentina.

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Malvika Sharan - Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute and Co-founder, Open Life Science

Different stakeholders in research contribute to open science communities with a shared mission of making scientific knowledge freely available for public access. However, most of these communities operate independently of other initiatives, either lacking the capacity to build meaningful collaboration or competing for limited resources. This often results in scientific outputs that most users can find, but not access, build upon or reuse in their local contexts. In this talk, I invite you to reimagine if FAIR [1] guiding principles can be applied for building and supporting open science communities. Can this practice be extended for cross-community collaboration, knowledge exchange and sharing resources? I will discuss how intentional connections between community-led efforts benefit the larger open science ecosystem by enabling sustainable development, maintenance and reuse of community resources. Bringing examples from my work in The Turing Way, Open Life Science and other initiatives, I will further highlight the irreplaceable importance of ‘people in open infrastructure’ — those who facilitate FAIRness through inclusive approaches in open science communities.

Malvika Sharan

Malvika Sharan is the community lead of The Turing Way project at The Alan Turing institute that is an open source community and guide for reproducible and collaborative data science. She involves and supports a diverse community of contributors - helping them adopt best practices in their research and collaborate within The Turing Way.

She is a co-founder of Open Life Science, a mentoring and training programme that empowers researchers to integrate open science in the context of their communities. She is a Software Sustainability Institute fellow, Open Bioinformatics Foundation board member, and an active contributor of open source community projects.

She is interested in collaborative development approaches, embedding inclusive practices and supporting projects to enhance the diversity of marginalised members in research leadership.

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Robert Terry - Research Manager, The Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, WHO

In the last decade significant outbreaks in infectious diseases from influenza, Ebola, Zika and now Covid-19 have highlighted the necessity to rethink and reengineer how science is organised. We need to change how researchers are rewarded and ensure knowledge can be disseminated in ways that integrates data and literature across disciplines. The current system of research publication and reward has been found wanting, when we needed it most. Covid-19 is set to affect the planet for the near future and climate change will further impact our environment and health. These are significant challenges and we need to take equally significant brave and bold steps to rise to them. We must put in place more efficient, effective and equitable mechanisms to manage knowledge with the key aim to benefit human and environmental health. In this talk Robert will reflect on his 20 years of experience in developing open access and data sharing initiatives that included the human genome project at the Wellcome Trust to the open access initiatives at the World Health Organization.

Robert Terry

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