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PROGRAM DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The Open Scholarship Initiative grew from a conversation about the future of open access on the ACRL listserv in the Fall of 2014. It officially took form in early 2015 thanks to support from the library and communications teams at George Mason University (arranged by Eric Olson), and to a pledge of financial support from UNESCO (arranged by Bhanu Neupane).
The first full year of OSI was devoted to laying the foundation for what we would try to accomplish, and to finding and recruiting high level scholarly communication experts from around the world. The second two years—2016 and 2017—centered around learning and fact-finding, featuring two full-group conferences from which numerous papers were published and thousands of lengthy listserv exchanges. The next phase—2018 and 2019—focused on action planning.
OSI’s 2020 work was largely unaffected by the pandemic, save for belt-tightening on the part of sponsors. We continued our research, writing, and outreach work, publishing several major policy papers and speaking about the future of scholarly communication at several virtual conferences. We also continued to work closely with UNESCO on the development of UNESCO’s open science policy.
Thank you to all the OSI participants who contributed to this year’s discussions and efforts. Thank you as well to the Science Communication Institute (SCI) board for allowing me to continue to devote full-time work to OSI.
Sincerely,
Glenn Hampson
Program director, OSI
Executive director, SCI