Over the first 18 months of the project, the project team was assembled and trained to do empirical research as well as understand the issues and underpinning literature on Open Science. We held weekly project meetings, of which one every month was opened up to members of the public, our Advisory Board and selected guests who visited us online to discuss the project and its intersections with their own work on Open Sciences in different locations around the world.
During the first six months of the project, the PI did extensive research towards framing the conceptual underpinnings of the project, which took the forms of a monograph called "Philosophy of Open Science", which has now been published. In addition, she wrote two major papers, one looking at the intersection between Open Science and epistemic diversity (now published in the top journal in the field, Philosophy of Science) and the other investigating the ways in which plant science can be documented and organised to include participation by a variety of expertises (now published in the main Open Access journal in philosophy of biology, PTPBio). At the same time and throughout the first two years of the project, the PI gave dozens of talks to a vast variety of audiences, including philosophers, historians, scientists, data experts, policy-makers and higher education leaders, to alert them to the project and garner feedback on the ways in which we are proposing to bring concerns with diversity and justice into a philosophical conceptualisation of Open Science. The PI also worked on a report on Reproducibility for the Belgian Academy of Science, thereby pushing forward that aspect of the project while benefiting from wide-ranging feedback from Academy members and consultation with research and industry leaders. Last but not least, the PI continued research on COVID-19 data sharing, whose outputs examine in detail the conditions under which an open exchange of information can benefit - or harm! - research on effective pandemic responses.
During months 7-18 of the project, the PI worked intensively with the research fellows and Phd students to define the fieldsites and set up those collaborations in order to pave the way for fieldwork. Collaborations are now established with major institutions in Ghana, Italy, Greece, the US and India. Establishing collaborations took months longer than expected, due to pandemic-related delays.
The PI has worked with the Research Fellows to set up their conceptual contributions, including on data integration and modelling in ethological research, as well as on the choice of variables in space experiments (and its implications for curating and re-using those results, when they are made widely accessible). With both research fellows, we also started to draft the proposals for special collections on research environments and epistemic injustice, as originally planned for the project.
