Iratxe Puebla (Co-chair of the OSMI Working Group 3) presented the Open Science Monitoring Initiative’s work with scholarly content providers, publishers, repositories, and data centres. A key distinction in Iratxe’s presentation: this work is explicitly not about building rankings or passing judgment on levels of openness. It is about generating evidence that allows informed decisions, for example, whether a journal should update its open access policy, or how a funder like NIH can monitor data-sharing practices across generalist repositories.
Iratxe raised a challenge that will resonate with anyone working in this space: as more platforms adopt open science monitoring, they are applying different methodologies to calculate indicators for similar practices within open science. Some level of standardisation, or at least consensual definitions, will be needed to prevent a future in which many indicators exist but none are comparable. She also called explicitly for content providers to share their indicator practices openly, so the community can audit and refine them. Learn more about the results of the OSMI Working Group 3 survey here.