Eurodoc’s Oleksandr Berezko (President) and Sebastian Dahle (Vice President) participated in the Open and Universal Science (OPUS) Project Kick-Off meeting, coordinated and hosted by PLOCAN, the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands, which took place on September 19–20, 2022 at PLOCAN premises in Telde, Gran Canaria, Spain. OPUS officially started on September 1, and it is the first event to bring together all the project partners.
In the next three years, the OPUS consortium will work on approaches to reform the research assessment system in the EU to incentivise taking up Open Science practices such as Open Access publishing, early sharing of research outputs, and involving citizens and civil society in the co-creation of research and innovation.
Jean-Emmanuel Faure, DG RTD, Policy Officer for Open Science at EU Commission, and Rinske Van-Den-Berg, OPUS Project Officer in the European Research Executive Agency (REA), joined the Kick-Off meeting online and presented expectations of the project from their perspectives and provided valuable inputs on successful project implementation.
Following that, project partners discussed all the work packages and the related implementation plans. Representatives of RESOLVO Srl, Yerun, CRAC-Vitae, MCAA, Eurodoc, UNESCO, and TrustInside presented the plan to conduct state-of-the-art on existing literature and initiatives for Open Science. CRAC-Vitae and Technopolis presented Work Packages 2 and 3: Interventions for Open Science and Indicators and Metrics for Open Science (Reward and Incentives for Researchers). In the next years, OPUS will develop interventions to be tested by pilot research-performing organisations (RPO) and research-funding organisations (RFO). In WP4, OPUS will test interventions and metrics for Open Science via three pilot RPOs (Nova University Lisbon, University of Rijeka, and the University of Cyprus) and two pilot RFOs from Lithuania and Romania (RCL and UEFISCDI).
Oleksandr Berezko, President of Eurodoc: "OPUS will ensure that early-career researchers' voice is heard during the European policy development. The project is also a great chance to collaborate with our alumni, as Gareth O'Neill (Technopolis), one of the key project partners, is a former Eurodoc President (2017-2019)."
Sebastian Dahle, Vice President of Eurodoc: “OPUS project is a unique opportunity, where we will synthesize and amend best practices on incentivizing Open Science, test the approaches in real life and provide direct input for the European policy development.”
Eurodoc thanks Dr. Gordon Dalton, the project coordinator, for the perfectly organized event, and looks forward to further collaborating on this exciting project.