The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the urgent need to strengthen global scientific collaboration, and to ensure the fundamental right to universal access to scientific progress and its applications. Open Science (OS) is central to achieving these goals. It aims to make science accessible, transparent, and effective by providing barrier-free access to scientific publications, data, and infrastructures, along with open software, Open Educational Resources, and open technologies. OS also promotes public trust in science at a time when it has never been more important to do so. Over the past decade, momentum towards the widespread adoption of OS practices has been primarily driven by declarations (e.g., DORA, the Leiden Manifesto). These serve an important role, but for OS to truly take root, researchers also must be fully incentivized and rewarded for its practice. This requires research funders and academic leaders to take the lead in collaborating, with researchers in designing, and implementing new incentive structures, and to actively work to socialize these throughout the research ecosystem. The US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Roundtable on Aligning Research Incentives for OS is one such effort. This paper examines the strategy behind convening the Roundtable, its current participant makeup, focus, and outputs. It also explores how this approach might be expanded and adapted throughout the global OS community.
Building Momentum to Realign Incentives to Support Open Science