2021-04-20
ON-MERRIT is pleased to announce its brand new series of virtual appointments!
They aim to present the project objectives and results on the one hand and explore several issues related to Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Open Science with experts in those fields.
The burning issues tackled in the first batch of conversations are various. They span from research assessment and ways for RRI to change career progression and equal evaluation to Open Science as a driver to the change in research practices, from the difficulties in gender equality in research and academia to open science in the Global South.
Here’s the summary of the webinars and the topics that we will discuss over the next months. Register and stay up to date by following us on Twitter!
Who might be left behind in the transition to Open Science? This webinar introduces participants to Robert Merton’s notion of the Matthew effect in academia and his later work on cumulative advantage (disadvantage). Against this backdrop of a close reading of Merton’s analysis, the webinar draws links to the recent reception of these two concepts in the Open Science discourse. The webinar is related to research activities in ON-MERRIT, an EC-funded project to investigate how and if open and responsible research practices could mitigate or worsen existing inequalities in academia.
Open research is definitely amongst the hot topics of the moment: the COVID19 pandemic has brought an exceptional sharing of research data and an even more exceptional uptake of preprints publishing. But is this methodological revolution here to stay? What is holding us back from making Open Science simply the default way of doing Science? And is Open Science responsible science by default? In this ON-MERRIT webinar, Paola will illustrate the principles and motivation behind a complete transition to open research practices. She will make the case that the uptake of these practices needs to be a slow, responsible process, based on education and training of core and much-needed skills. Paola will also dedicate some time to the invisible side of open science, the one that can lead to the construction of more inclusive, fair, and just academic spaces.
This webinar will explore what academia rewards and the consequences of this, before looking at what academia actually values about research and researchers, and why this is often difficult to measure. It will then consider whether falling back on bibliometrics to evaluate research is always a bad thing before drawing some conclusions.
As research is global, so is Open Science. However, as ON-MERRIT investigates, Open Science doesn’t necessarily grant inclusion and opportunities for everyone. In this last webinar of the series, Dasapta will guide us through the challenges of Open Science in Indonesia and why these matter for the global research world.