Helping science succeed [email protected]
SCI invents, launches and manages a variety of projects to help improve science communication. Not all of these end up being sustainable, generating sufficient funding support and participation to move from the drawing board to reality. This isn’t for lack of merit, and some of the projects that didn’t take flight in past years may be revisited in the future. Below are summaries of the main projects SCI has launched over the past few years. Since late 2014, all of SCI’s funding and bandwidth has been supporting the Open Scholarship Initiative, our largest project to-date.
The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is an ambitious, global, multi-stakeholder effort to improve the flow of information within research and between researchers, policymakers, funders and the general public. OSI’s main goals are to improve the openness of research and scholarly outputs, lower the barriers for researchers and scholars everywhere to engage in the global research community, and increase opportunities for all countries and people everywhere to benefit from this engagement. Closely connected to this work, OSI is also focusing on correcting a broad range of scholarly communication deficiencies and inefficiencies—without these corrections, open will not be achievable or sustainable.
There is no other undertaking like this, focusing on improving the entire landscape of scholarly communication everywhere by working together on this vital task across institutions, disciplines, regions and stakeholder groups. The specific problems this group is addressing are (1) a lack of coordination of other reform efforts in the scholarly communication space, (2) the fact that many of the reform efforts is this space are not designed for broad adoption, therefore impeding more rapid progress on open, and (3) a lack of information and understanding about the true dimensions of this issue.
OSI fills the “NOASIR” role for UNESCO—we serve as UNESCO’s Network for Open Access to Scientific Information and Research. What this means is that UNESCO is relying on OSI to support and cultivate the international open environment and connect stakeholders, support research and development in open technologies, policies and practices, defend access to scientific journals to developing countries, and serve as a laboratory for innovation and a catalyst for international cooperation.
OSI’s unique capabilities include:
The goals of OSI are to:
More information about OSI’s history, mission and goals can be found on the OSI website at www.osiglobal.org.
OSI websiteBecause science communication is such a disparate and undefined field, SCI worked for several years to pull together a network of practitioners in this field to share insights and experiences. This work has been seriously sidetracked by OSI, but we haven’t removed it from “active” status.
SCI is planning to organize more conferences on important topics as our budget allows. Most of our conferences to-date have revolved around OSI. Our 2013 Journals & Science conference laid the groundwork for OSI, which was launched the following year.
Journals & ScienceScience communication training is needed, but there are very few opportunities for obtaining an advanced degree in this field. Part of the issue here is coherence—the academic community doesn’t agree on what the field looks like, let alone a PhD program. We may revisit this idea once we’ve made more progress definining the field.
SCI is in the early stages of considering what a broad, multi-disciplinary network of researchers would look like whose purpose is to share research on climate change and work together on solutions. This network might be modeled after OSI, or launched as an OSI demonstration project.
What are the pros and cons of having a single repository for all science research? OSI has been debating this issue for several years and tracking the progress of similar ideas. OSI may try to prototype this idea, but if it doesn’t, then SCI will.
Learn MoreScience clubs can be important gateways for kids to get interested in science and stay interested. Not all schools and communities are fortunate enough to have active and capable clubs, though. The goal of this project is to improve the capacity of select clubs nationwide through networking.
SCI has invested significant time and effort on a number of other projects since 2011. These are currently inactive and may or may not be reactivated (depending on funding and interest):