Theory of change

Last updated on: December 12th, 2022

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

Options for 2023:

• Work with funders to promote the publication of grant proposals
• 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
• Enlist community champions to teach and facilitate step-by-step research publishing
• Run “publishathons” for non-profits and research organisations to publish their annual transparency reports