About ICOR
Building the ICOR Community and a Culture of Change
The problem
There is growing recognition that open research practices lead to more collaboration and faster, better outcomes as reflected in reports from UNESCO, the UN, governments, funders, and institutions. Yet scant evidence and best practices have emerged that can inform policy and research initiatives. Most research programs are not designed with the goal of collecting data on the impact of open research, nor are there coordinated incentives and rewards for open behaviors and collaboration. And while there is a growing number of inventive technologies and processes that support the practice of open science, these are generally disconnected and sometimes in competition.
Initial steps
The ICOR Circle of Strategists has been meeting since 2020 as an initiative of Rapid Science, to identify policies, tools and practices that will challenge the status quo of closed research by (1) producing evidence of the benefits of open and collaborative research with real world implementations, (2) addressing issues of non reproducibility and paucity of innovation, and (3) de-emphasizing high-impact publication as the primary means of career advancement.
Initially, twenty stakeholders met—representing leadership in academia, funding and nonprofit organizations, government, publishing and research—and proposed ten goals for change throughout the research cycle, focusing on synchronicity and practical, reproducible implementation projects.
The community mission
In December 2021, ICOR launched its community building efforts around these opportunities. Through our webinars, project library, and partnering, the following mission statement has emerged:
- To enable and incentivize an open collaborative research culture by collectively strategizing and sharing innovative approaches
- To demonstrate in real-world settings the community’s problem-solving practices, tools, metrics, and incentives
- To build a body of evidence regarding the best practices of collaborative open research and its ability to improve the speed, reproducibility, equity, and impact of outcomes
Implementation
With this mission defined, ICOR’s prioritized goals have emerged:
- register projects and connect them to opportunities defined in the research cycle
- build coalition between initiatives in the same arena
- advise and help implement experimental designs that enable collection and analysis of results (meta-analysis)
- communicate results, trends and gaps of the community initiatives within the context of the research cycle
- build, catalog, and disseminate a body of evidence for open scholarship as a means of more reproducible and innovative outcomes
- demonstrate practical methodologies that enable, incentivize and reward open and collaborative research
The community continues to diversify, grow and blossom with fresh, completely original innovations and strategies; we welcome all like-minded individuals, organizations, and projects to participate in this grand experiment.