While the scientific community has made great strides in the past century, the time of the lone scientist, or even teams of scientists from closely-related fields is over. Society faces complex, multi-dimensional challenges which can only be met by strong collaborations and tight integration across multi-disciplinary teams of scientists and technologists. The ICOR effort is critical in making this badly-needed shift and provides a grounded model for universities, funding agencies and science and technology-based organizations.

Among the barriers for accelerating the transition to open science is implementation. The ICOR initiative is addressing this barrier by building a roadmap to help funders and institutions incentivize and reward open science and collaboration. This initiative will not only accelerate the translation of research discoveries toward greater outcomes, but increase the impact of research funding.

It’s crucial to build a body of evidence on the benefits of open research that can inform policies within governments, funders, and institutions. ICOR is assembling and facilitating key implementation projects throughout the research lifecycle that will be proof points for open research. This initiative builds on the important work done by the NASEM Roundtable by moving from recommendations to action

ICOR’s goals are in alignment with our mission and values at Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s, which are to foster collaboration, transparency, and open access data sharing to accelerate the pace of discovery, and inform the path to a cure. It’s exciting to see ICOR build on our work as a case study for how funders can use policy and best practices to incentivize collaborative open research.

Technological advances have accelerated the pace of discovery and the application of that knowledge to the greatest challenges we face in health and climate change. Increasingly, these problems require interdisciplinary approaches best tackled by collaborative efforts. And yet, academic science remains fixed on a model of reward favoring the individual over the team with recognition based on priority of authorship in prestige journals. The projects outlined by this group are both creative and urgently needed to disrupt that model and help establish a reward system for team-based research.

Over the decades I’ve referred to the ‘five deadly sins’ of scientific publishing, asking why researchers voluntarily give over control to publishers who delay, hide and deeply, significantly damage the discovery process. It is encouraging and even startling to see this group implementing real-life solutions to return the dialog to authors and their peers, with rewards based on their authentic contributions to science.

There is a growing awareness that collaborations and the open sharing of information facilitate scientific discoveries. Despite this recognition, we are at an early stage of developing effective ways of incentivizing and recognizing contributions in open and collaborative science. The ICOR initiative is tackling this important problem and is well positioned to make significant contributions to the practice of science in the coming decade.

Scientists understand that research will best proceed if findings are openly shared, and that transformative discoveries will typically emerge from diverse, collaborative teams of researchers. However, academic researchers are trapped by institutional and funding agency recognition and rewards systems that assign value to journal prestige, position on author lists, and perceptions of individual achievement that deter open science. ICOR is building a pathway for stakeholder groups to rectify misaligned incentives and place primary value on research quality and impact.