Cartographies for an inclusive Open Science

Abstract

The Call for the STI Conference held in September 2024, in Berlin, argues that there is a variety of processes of openness among different communities and stakeholders which pose questions about the interaction of openness and closedness. It stimulates the participants to ask how much closedness is embedded in openness and vice versa and how to measure these intertwined phenomena. This keynote has been framed in these basic concerns and intends to advance towards the intersection with inclusiveness, considering that openness is necessary but not sufficient to achieve a more equitable and effective scholarly communication globally. In the convergence of field approach and structural heterogeneity, we build a conceptual framework to assess the combinations observed in the space of open science, and the stakeholders that represent forces towards inclusiveness or exclusiveness.

Exploring the main indicators of inclusive openness, 7 cartographies are proposed for a global mapping and the discussion of the main issues at stake towards a just transition to open science: 1) a comparison between the distribution by country of repositories of published output and primary data repositories, 2) a mapping of the Current Information systems (CRIS) and their different developments at the national and institutional level, 3) a cartography of persistent identifiers of digital resources comparing DOI and ARK, 4) a cartography of persistent identifiers for  active researchers (ORCID) by country and its weak representation of the national research communities, 5) a comparison of the coverage of identifiers of research organizations (ROR) with a national database of organizations, 6) a cartography of indexed journals with no-fee for publishing or reading and 7) a mapping of multilingualism in scholarly publishing, by platform. Finally, some study cases are discussed to show examples of the limited inclusiveness of the current state of open infrastructures and publishing platforms.