At the 40th session of UNESCO’s General Conference, 193 Members States tasked the Organization with the development of an international standard-setting instrument on Open Science in the form of a UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science to be adopted by Member States in 2021.
The Recommendation is expected to define shared values and principles for Open Science, and identify concrete measures on Open Access and Open Data, with proposals to bring citizens closer to science and commitments to facilitate the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge around the world. The Recommendation will be developed through a regionally balanced, multistakeholder, inclusive and transparent consultation process.
UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science will complement the 2017 Recommendation on Science and Scientific Research. It will also build upon the UNESCO Strategy on Open Access to Scientific Information and Research and the new UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources.
UNESCO Recommendations are legal instruments in which “the General Conference formulates principles and norms for the international regulation of any particular question and invites Member States to take whatever legislative or other steps may be required in conformity with the constitutional practice of each State and the nature of the question under consideration to apply the principles and norms aforesaid within their respective territories”. Emanating from the Organization's supreme governing body and hence possessing great authority, recommendations are intended to influence the development of national laws and practices.
In line with the 40 C/Resolution 24 of the UNESCO General Conference and according to the Roadmap for the development of the UNESCO Recommendation on open Science, the first draft of the Recommendation was transmitted by the Director-General to the UNESCO Member States for their consideration. The Circular letter CL/4333 is available online in English and French.
- First draft of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science
English | Français | Spanish | Russian | Arabic | Chinese
Please feel free to share your comments on this first draft, with us via openscience@unesco.org by 31 December 2020, or through the online Survey launched by the International Science Council (ISC), for assisting UNESCO in gathering comments from the scientific community on the first draft of the Recommendation on Open Science by 15 December.
Inputs to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science
In addition to the inputs received though the multistakeholder global and regional consultations, the following inputs were received in response to a call for inputs for the development of the first draft text of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.
The ideas and opinions expressed in the following papers are those of the authors; they are not those of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization.
Input from Global Young Academy (GYA)- Input form the African Open Science Platform (AOSP)
- Input from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
- Input form the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) and the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo)
- Input from cOAlition S
- Input from the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
- Inputs form Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA)
- Input from the Citizen Science Global Partnership Citizen Science & Open Science Community of Practice
- Input from Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL)
- Input from the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI)
- Input from InterAcademy Partnership (IAP)
- Input from International Science Council (ISC)
- Input from OpenAIRE
- Input from the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)
Resources:
- First draft of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese)
- Circular letter (CL/4333) on the Preliminary Report on the first draft of the Recommendation on Open Science
- Towards a UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science in English, French and Spanish
- Preliminary study of the technical, financial and legal aspects of the desirability of a UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science
- Consolidated Roadmap for a Possible UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science
- UNESCO Open Access
- 2017 Recommendation on Science and Scientific Research
- 2019 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (page 170)