Equipping institutional self-assessment of open science practices
Many research-performing organizations are interested in or have already set out to strengthen open science at their institution. To facilitate top-down engagement from institutional leaders and culture change, a team of six open science experts in collaboration with three German pilot universities developed Road2Openness (), a web-based self-assessment tool that helps institutions to evaluate their current Open Science activities and supports them with recommendations for a strategic opening to develop institutional training, infrastructure and incentive systems for open science.
In a two-step process, there is first a web-based questionnaire to assess current institutional practices in a number of open science areas, namely Open Access Research Outputs (publications, data and methods), Citizen Science, Open Innovation, Open Educational Resources, Research Quality Management, Open Governance and Open Research Assessment. As a second step, the tool provides customised information from the literature and good-practice examples from other institutions to support further strategic development in open science areas that are of interest to the institution.
The web-based tool is available in German and English to use for free and anonymously by both institutional leaders and open science practitioners to facilitate strategic institutional development in many different areas of open science. The tool and all the information it contains is available openly and freely online, so scaling up only requires translation into other languages, for which the developers would be happy to collaborate.
Road2openness was co-developed in 2021/2022 with three German universities and piloted by them. Each of the pilot universities have successfully started a process to implement open science practices in their institutions. The Road2openness development process brought together many open science practitioners at a range of institutions who now advise institutional leadership on next steps for implementing a culture change towards opening their institutions.
Contributed by Verena Heise (Freelance Open Science Researcher, Germany), Patrick Figge (University of Passau, Germany), Nils Hachmeister (PD Consultancy, Germany), Ulrich Herb (scidecode science consulting,Saarland University and State Library, Germany), Damian Paderta (Freelance Digital Consultant, Germany), Petra Siegele (Head of the Austrian Center for Citizen Science at the OeAD, Austria's Agency for Education and Internationalisation)