What does common ground look like? Between 2014 and 2018, OSI participants identified and agreed on four main pillars:
- Science and society will benefit from open done right (not just any kind of open policies)
- Successful solutions will require broad collaboration across stakeholder groups, fields, and regions of the world
- Connected issues also need to be addressed in order for open solutions to work—issues like impact factors, peer review, and the culture of communication in academia, and
- Open isn’t a single outcome but a spectrum of outcomes (as defined in OSI’s DART spectrum).
Since 2018, OSI has delivered policy reports, conference presentations and speeches that identify three additional pillars. While OSI hasn’t voted on these three ideas, they have been open for global feedback, and the feedback we’ve received to-date has been entirely positive.
- Our global open policy solutions must be equitable
- Open should not be treated as goal unto itself, but as one tool among many that can help researchers succeed. To this end, our common ground policy foundations should be built on what we can do together to help research succeed, pulling in common elements of open ideas along the way.
- Our global open policies must be built on evidence rather than ideology—evidence like understanding what kinds of open solutions exist, which of these solutions work best for which purposes, which solutions researchers want and need the most, and a clear and unbiased evaluation of how our current open policy efforts are falling short and even making access and equity worse.
