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Introduction 

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) use public-funded open bioinformatics resources (e.g., databases, software, tools, workflows, standards, ontologies, cloud computing, etc) as business models but also, to create innovative added-value products and services that they proceed to sell to larger industry clients. As a result, socioeconomic and societal benefits are generated following impact pathways. PathOS aims to unravel the totality of the impact pathways and shed light on effect of ELIXIR’s activities on fostering innovation in the industry sector, and how this then translates to socioeconomic and societal benefits. A big challenge for the project will be to successfully identify and quantify these benefits!

Why was this particular study selected and how does it contribute to the testing and operationalization of Open Science indicators? 

Open Science is a founding principle of ELIXIR – you could say that, as an organisation, we live and breathe Open Science. In practice, it means that the >400 bioinformatics resourcesunder the ELIXIR umbrella can be freely used by almost anyone and anywhere, with an internet connection and the relevant skillset.

Why do you think this is study is important for the broader Open Science context?

Whilst Open Science is often associated to the academic sector, this case study represents a valuable opportunity to look at its effects in an industry context and how the science produced under Open Science principles contributes to innovative solutions with benefits for society and the economy. Practicing and enabling Open Science takes effort, hence it’s important that positive effects are highlighted. 

How will this study contribute to the main aims of the project? 

Bioinformatics applications have significant societal and economic benefits – these are found in health (e.g., personalised medicine, epidemics monitoring, development of treatments and vaccines), food security (e.g., aquaculture, crop development) and the environment (e.g., biodiversity management, pollution remediation), to name a few. The case study will hence directly contribute to providing evidence to support a better understanding of the implications of Open Science for science, economy and society. 

Who are the main actors involved and why are they important within the R&I ecosystem represented in this study? 

ELIXIR is among just a few international research infrastructures with a formal industry engagement portfolio that spans all its member countries, and unique in the European landscape with such an extensive set of freely accessible bioinformatics resources. The case study will actively engage, and co-create, with those in ELIXIR who develop and operate bioinformatics resources, industry end-users of these resources, as well as a range of open science and innovation experts within and beyond the project consortium. Strategic engagement with these actors provides crucial information on the impact created by the open nature of ELIXIR resources.

What kind of impact is expected to be generated by the results/outcomes of the study?

Whilst policy-makers and ELIXIR’s public funders generally agree that Open Science is the right approach, they remain keen to better understand how impacts develop and how they can help. This case study will contribute answers to these needs, with an industry angle. Although there is a cost to tax-payers for ELIXIR to develop and operate its bioinformatics resources, which are free at the point of use (even for commercial purposes), we are keen to build a body of evidence showing that the socio-economic and societal benefits far outweigh the costs.

How aware of Open Science is the bioinformatics industry sector? How can they benefit from it?

In the attempt to understand the contribution of Open Data in life sciences’ innovation, ELIXIR performed a study which showed that up to 76% of studied SMEs within the bioinformatics sector would not be able to offer their product without accessing data and other such resources shared on open repositories. This and other studies indicate that industry puts a lot of value on being able to access bioinformatics resources that are open, and the results can really benefit society. A concrete example of the open science value derives from the COVID-19 pandemic, where the first ever approved mRNA-based vaccine for usage in healthy humans was developed by Pfizer and BioNTech (Polack, 2020). In this case, the publicly available viral sequence in the European Nucleotide Archive with the sequence number MN908947.3 was used to evaluate the safety, tolerability, immunogenicity, and efficacy of RNA vaccine candidates against COVID-19 in healthy individuals (BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc., 2020). Nevertheless, as mentioned in the BY-COVID Industry map report, it is important to understand the players in creating innovative solutions and moving beyond the boundaries of a pharmaceutical company since public health agencies, academic researchers, data infrastructure providers, and public funders are playing an essential role We believe that the multi-stakeholder approach of this project will broaden the bioinformatics industry approach to open science.

The ELIXIR team 

Despoina Sousoni, ELIXIR Industry Officer

Despoina joined ELIXIR in 2022 and leads on the industry portfolio by managing a range of engagement activities based on ELIXIR members' needs and EU-funded projects. These activities include support on the Industry Advisory Committee, management of Industry and Innovation Forums and a Knowledge Exchange Scheme between ELIXIR members and industry. Also, among her responsibilities are the enrichment of ELIXIR's industry network, match-making based on related interests, collection of industry use cases and contributions to open innovation.

Erika Balsyte, ELIXIR External Relations Officer

Erika joined ELIXIR in August 2022 and actively contributes to the industry and impact portfolios. Erika supports the operation of the ELIXIR Focus Groups (Impact, Innovation and Industry) managed by the ELIXIR External Relations team. Additionally, she contributes to the ELIXIR’s work to demonstrate its value and impact through the range of indicators. Erika also provides the team with administrative and organisational support while implementing outreach activities to key stakeholders, notably partners from 220+ institutes within ELIXIR, scientists and partners outside the ELIXIR. Her role includes supporting the team on several EU-funded projects, including PathOS.

Corinne Martin, ELIXIR Senior Impact Officer

Corinne joined ELIXIR in 2018 and leads on two portfolios: impact and international relations. In particular, she works to empower Member countries of ELIXIR in evaluating and communicating the public value of their bioinformatics resources and underlying research infrastructure, in support of long-term sustainability. She also coordinates international relations for France, Australia and the USA, as well as contributing to the organisation’s positioning and visibility with funders, policy-makers and other stakeholders of research infrastructures.

By Nicki Lisa Cole, Know-Center

Co-creation is at the heart of the PathOS strategy because we know, as practitioners of Open Science, that the best science is collaborative science. Therefore, a key task following our project kick-off has been the establishment of a community of expert stakeholders who will contribute to co-creation activities across the lifespan of the project.

Identification and composition of this co-creation community is currently underway. Our strategy is to bring together 8-10 people per case study, whose expertise and experiences can inform the development of each case (research questions, methods, and data sources) and the Open Science impact pathways and indicators that each case will focus on. This co-creation community will be engaged through focus groups and workshops at four key milestones throughout the project's lifecycle: months 6-7, months 11-13, months 26-28, and month 32.

The first round of focus groups to support case study development will take place during February and March 2023. If you have interest and expertise in any of the following cases that frame the project, please contact Nicki Lisa Cole at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by the end of December 2022.

Accelerating collaborations within academia & industry

This case study focuses on the use of the Portuguese publication repository infrastructure for OS and addresses knowledge diffusion via collaborations and the visibility of individual research institutions.

Research data and knowledge / use in non-academia

This case study focuses on the use of French infrastructure for OS and address research data and knowledge re-use and the societal impact, including motivations of use.

Cross cutting effects due to Open Research data from National Repository

This case study investigates the effect of data availability through national data repositories in two ways: whether data availability increases uptake or usage, and whether this is different when data is shared in national repositories compared to other ways of sharing.

Open Science in reducing & remedying structural inequalities

This case study investigates the effects of OS in fostering greater inclusion of women in the AI sector by examining women’s performance on scholarly literature and its scientific impact, women’s presence in pre-prints, collaboration patterns among different types of institutions based on OS outputs (publications, datasets, software), and disparities in skills specializations, senior roles, and career trajectories in AI fields leading to gender segregation.

Open Science Practices during the COVID-19 pandemic

This case study investigates OS practices in the areas of climate science and covid-19 research and quantifies their scientific and societal impact during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine OS practices and impacts including the scientific impact of open peer-reviewed publications, pre-prints with a focus on fast publication process, collaboration patterns and accelerating efforts to mitigate impacts, open data and other research artifacts made available through various repositories leading to technological applications, and the systematic use of OS in policy documents through citation analysis.

Innovation from open science resources

This case study is specific to the life sciences domain and focuses on the use by industry of open bioinformatics resources made available through ELIXIR. These range from databases (e.g., molecular data, scientific literature), tools (e.g., software, workflows), cloud computing, training, and interoperability and other standards.

Watch this space for more news about our project.

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

1. 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. 

2. 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: 

1. Open Science impact pathways framework
2. Handbook of Open Science impact indicators and their measures
3. Set of AI-tools, data and methods for estimating Open Science impact indicators 
4. Open Science Cost-Benefit Analysis framework
5. 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..