Introducing Open Research Beacon

Navigating the vast and evolving landscape of open research can be challenging. We are thrilled to announce the launch of ICOR’s Open Research Beacon (ORB), an expansion of our Project Library launched in 2023. It is designed to help the research community find and collaborate with open research projects worldwide.

The global open research movement has progressed significantly, but this growth has created a challenge for leaders in funding, policy, and advocacy. With a growing and maturing landscape of initiatives, it’s difficult to keep track of key developments, connect the dots between projects, and learn about their current status and requirements. This fragmentation has hindered collaboration and slowed progress toward the adoption and use of promising projects.

ORB, built by ICOR on the PubPub platform with input from our open research community and generous funding from SPARC, now features over 100 projects. This support has allowed us to transform our original Project Library into a more comprehensive and searchable platform that features simplified steps for project owners to submit and update their goals and progress. The same filtering functions remain for users to quickly find projects by category, research lifecycle stage, and output type.

As the central hub for open research projects, we plan to capture comprehensive data on all community efforts in this sphere. Continuing to expand the project database is crucial for researchers, funders, and policymakers to understand the open science landscape and the ICOR community to identify trends, gaps, and areas where collaboration can be beneficial. ORB’s roadmap includes developing features and metadata that promote these efforts through automatic tracking and identification of project compatibility.

This MVP launch offers a crucial opportunity to learn and gather ideas that inform future needs and applications.  We invite you to explore ORB, provide feedback, submit projects, and learn more about the community as change agents in facilitating open, collaborative research.