From policy to practice: Lessons learned from an open science funding initiative

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Abstract

In the past few years, there has been a notable shift in the open science landscape as more countries and international agencies release recommendations and implementation guidelines for open scholarship. In August 2022, the US White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) released a memo with guidance that all federally funded research articles be (1) open access and (2) include sharing of underlying datasets in public repositories. The global open scholarship conversation has shifted from making a case for open science to developing operational workflows to assess, monitor, and enforce open policies that can normalize, simplify, and streamline these processes for use in daily research practice. As various workflows are proposed, there is a need for collective action across funders, institutions, and governments to align on open science policies and practices to reduce the cost and friction of adoption.

Here, we examine the practices of the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative, whose mission is to accelerate the pace of discovery and inform the path to a cure for Parkinson’s disease through collaboration, research-enabling resources, and data sharing. ASAP was conceived through an open-by-design framework from the start. To learn more, please see the ASAP Blueprint for Collaborative Open Science, which provides a detailed overview of the ASAP open science policies, templates, and reports. Grantees within the ASAP Collaborative Research Network (CRN), an international, multidisciplinary, and multi-institutional network of collaborating investigators, are already required to be compliant with the recommendations of the OSTP memo by adhering to ASAP’s open science policies. For example, ASAP requires the posting of a preprint at the time of (or before) article submission, immediate open access for all publications, and a mandatory CC-BY license. Additionally, at the time of publication, all underlying research outputs (protocols, code, datasets) must be posted to a FAIR repository and all research outputs from ASAP-funded research must have DOIs or other appropriate identifiers, such as RRIDs for material resources, appropriately linked to the manuscript (see Table 1 for list of identifier types). Here, we evaluate the feasibility, ease, impact, and improvement to our open science policies as they were implemented within the ASAP CRN program and discuss our lessons learned to assist other funders and institutions considering open science implementation.