2021-07-19
ON-MERRIT (Observing and Negating Matthew Effects in Responsible Research & Innovation Transition) aims at contributing to an equitable scientific system that rewards researchers based on merit. For this purpose, it investigates the impact of open science practices in academia, industry, and policy.
ON-MERRIT uses a co-creation process to investigate how user studies, different disciplines and combined approaches can help explain the interaction and engagement of various stakeholders with open science practices, and produce recommendations and guidelines as a result of it.
To do so, the project uses a mixed-methods research approach consisting of surveys, interviews, and workshops with selected experts.
So far, ON-MERRIT used co-creation methods to prepare the tools used to interact with industry and policy makers.
For industry, a two step approach was taken: first, several interviews with stakeholders from SMEs and industries were conducted. The goal was to understand information-seeking behaviours, awareness of Open Science in general and uptake of Open Science Resources, such as Open Access, Open Data and Open Source specifically, as well as the related absorptive capacities for Open Science uptake. Second, based on the feedback received from the interviewees, a questionnaire has been created and circulated to the interviewees as well as to the ON-MERRIT consortium to receive further feedback, before disseminating it to selected SMEs and industries in the domains of agriculture, climate and health.
Engaging with policy makers implied manifold approaches: first came the identification of the experts in the core areas ON-MERRIT works on (Agriculture, Climate and Health) with interviews and their consecutive involvement in the thematic workshops. These workshops were three and dedicated each to one of the areas mentioned above; an additional workshop to wrap up thoughts has been organised with the experts from the previous events that wanted to participate. This last workshop has been complemented with virtual collaboration tools (such as whiteboard and sticky notes). In addition to that, policymakers as parliamentarians have also been the recipient of a survey, followed up by selected interviews, on the uptake of Open Science in information seeking practices in policy making. The RRI and OS community has been invited to provide feedback through the ON-MERRIT Twitter and the RRI Ecosystem Facebook page. In addition to that, the OpenAIRE NOADs (National experts on Open Science) that were identified as more closely related with policymakers in their countries have been asked for comments and suggestions.
In addition to our interactions with industry and policy makers as presented above, we developed two other surveys. With the first one, we are aiming at getting a clearer picture of the uptake of Responsible Research and Innovation and Open Science principles in relation to policy and training. With the second one, we would like to deepen our understanding of academic researchers’ views on career progression. As a follow up of the first survey, we conducted interviews with key persons that can help clarify the policies on OS and RRI at the institutional level.
Towards the end of 2021, ON-MERRIT is organising three co-creation workshops with researchers, research managers and funders to receive feedback and validation of the recommendations and guidelines that represent the final outcome of the project. If you wish to be involved, please get in contact with us: info[at]on-merrit.eu.