Theory of Change

Last updated on: April 6th, 2023

Impact goals (where we want to be in 10-15 years):

• Foster research as a commons
• Foster a research culture that creates an improved and pluralistic understanding of our world
• Advance recognition of individual, collective, and community-driven contributions to the process of knowing

Key assumptions (what we know):

1. Research is the process of gathering, documenting, and sharing information.
2. The resulting knowledge/understanding can only be as good as the process.
3. Science is a reflection of systems of power that privileges a dominant way of knowing.

Goals (what we want to achieve in 2-3 years):

1. We want to generate visibility for every step of the research process to make science more rigorous.
2. We want to generate visibility for every step of the research process to draw attention to different ways of knowing and collaboration.
3. We want to bridge research done in public, private, and across research institutions to facilitate more dynamic insight.

Enablers (what we need to succeed):

• Resources to challenge power (energy, agency, time, finances, and information).
• Policy landscape (e.g., Recognition & Rewards for research careers; UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science)
• Community (amplification, awareness, networked platform, shared insights etc.)

Dependencies or risks (what may limit our success):

• Lack of resources, unbalanced community
• Tension between scale and growing responsibly
• Technology changing (think: software dependency, open source maintenance)

Outputs / activities

2022

• Maintain ResearchEquals.com, for example:
  • ❓Reduce dependencies
  • ❓Identify and invest in key dependencies' sustainability
  • ❓Identify issues in and improve developer experience
  • ❓Identify issues in and improve user experience
  • ❓Make it overall easier to contribute to the project
• Extend ResearchEquals.com functionality
  • ❓Extend data sources that can be ingested (e.g., ✅ DataCite, ISBN, URLs
  • ✅ Create community curation models (e.g., overlay journals)
  • ❌ Provide collective authoring options
• ✅ Further develop and evaluate the pay-to-close model
• ❌ Season 3 of the Open Update, further establishing itself as an insightful resource in Open Science, incl. expert interviews, community developments and policy commentary
• ✅❓Engage with and promote step-by-step research journeys across universities and research labs through talks and workshops

2023

Don't

• Feature fever - we will not implement any major features that drastically alter what ResearchEquals can do. We will only implement minor features that expand the business capacity and refine the experience on the platform.

Do

• ✅ Create and run the pilot ResearchEquals Cohort
• ✅ Evaluate pilot and determine whether to run Cohorts on a regular basis
• Have one employee start the two-year CSCCE Certification program
• ✅ Evaluate and improve the quantitative feedback mechanisms available for ResearchEquals
  • ✅ Add collections growth to the real-time statistics page
  • Set growth targets
• Upgrade our supporting membership strategy
  • ✅ Integrate supporting memberships into ResearchEquals
  • Onboard ten new supporting members (individual or institutional)
  • ✅ Rethink our General Assembly strategy
• Build trust with our ResearchEquals Community
  • Create and implement an open startup strategy
  • ✅ Create and implement an archival strategy
• Support use of ResearchEquals for creative purposes
  • Work with funders to promote the publication of grant proposals
  • Enlist community champions to teach and facilitate step-by-step research publishing
  • Publish six use cases of ResearchEquals
• 2023 evaluation against POSI (see our 2022 evaluation as well)
• 2022 GHG emission assessment + a continuous emission assessment strategy
• ✅ Liberate Science Labs
  • ✅ Open Update season 3 with a co-host
  • ✅ Champion the creation of an open source CrossRef library
  • Organize Open Publishing Festival
  • ✅ Run a set of 3 webinars on the fediverse

Future action items

• Build, test, and improve analysis and visualisations to highlight connections between modules, researchers
• Explore and support additional incentives to open access and open science
• Identify and support research that showcases step-by-step publishing
• Run “publishathons” for non-profits and research organisations to publish their annual transparency reports