On 12 - 13 September 2022 in Athens, Greece, we launched the 3-year, Horizon Europe project “PathOS” aimed at identifying and quantifying the Key Impact Pathways of Open Science in order to lead to improved understanding of the forces at play and effective, evidence-based policy-making.
Pathos in Greek means passion, stong emotion, thrill, kick, showing our passion/pathos for Open Science.
The background: Open Science is a key EU policy priority and its importance has been highlighted in particular by Commissioner Moedas with the introduction of the so-called 3O’s in 2015. Since then, it has become the centerpiece of numerous initiatives and activities, from policy alignment, to fostering implementation mechanisms, to researcher uptake, to fostering collaboration with non-academia. Lessons learnt so far and planning for the future led to the integration of Open Science in Horizon Europe via the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud as a supporting mechanism and via bridging the gap with ERA (European Research Area) wide activities.
Why it matters: Despite the steady progress that the Open Science movement has made in recent decades, some barriers still prevent unlocking its full potential. This includes the costs of openness, lack of skills and capacity in data management, differing regulatory frameworks, and a lack of appropriate incentives in career advancement.
Against this complex context and current European landscape, it is clear that shaping effective Open Science policies requires an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms and underpinnings of Open Science practices, as well as their positive and negative causal effects on outcomes inside but also outside academia.
The implementation: To cover the many requirements of the project’s ambition, PathOS brings in a multi-disciplinary consortium of Open Science experts, infrastructure developers/operators, bibliometrics/scientometrics, data scientists, NLP/ML experts, sociologists, experts in socio-economic impact assessment and policy experts.
PathOS plans to build and go beyond the state of the art by
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identifying the causal pathways and measuring indicators for Open Science impact
PathOS will introduce “Policy Intelligence'' in assessing Open Science impact by (a) enhancing the existing impact assessment methodology to describe and measure the causalities of R&I impacts as a result of Open Science, and (b) complementing the traditional assessment methodology by streamlining a big data, AI-assisted policy modeling approach to support human judgment for evidence-informed understanding and policy making.
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providing a framework and conducting a Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) for Open Science practices
PathOS will build on previous frameworks, to develop a CBA model which is specifically tailored to open science practices. The model will be used to explain a specific set of open access impacts, those for which a monetary quantification is possible. By relating impacts with their costs, it will provide a powerful decision-making tool to drive scientific policies.
PathOS will be empirically anchored and informed by six target case studies that have been selected to present an end-to-end story across input-outputs–outcomes- impacts, covering different objectives (the why), different implementations mechanisms (the how), different actors in the Research & Innovation ecosystem (the who).
Our results: The project will culminate in a set of tools and guides that will be open to be used by the community:
- Open Science impact pathways framework
- Handbook of Open Science impact indicators and their measures
- Set of AI-tools, data and methods for estimating Open Science impact indicators
- Open Science Cost-Benefit Analysis framework
- Evidence-based policy recommendations
Contact us: If you have any story to share, or would like to join one of PathOS expert panels please let us know. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
