About the conference

Started in 2019, this conference brings together scholars from across disciplines who are interested in investigating and discussing the role and value of openness and collaboration in science.

In addition to inspirational paper sessions, the conference program typically includes a keynote speech, an OIS Debate, and an OIS experimentation session related to the year’s special conference theme. In these OIS experimentation sessions, we “walk the talk” by experimenting with novel ways to do our own research. In the past, for example, we have co-conceptualized the OIS research field from scratch (Beck et al., 2020), co-developed research proposals with “users” of our research (Beck et al., 2021), explored how Artificial Intelligence will influence openness and collaboration in science (Beck, Poetz, & Sauermann, 2022) and how it can help with creating synergies between scientific and societal impact (Beck, Grimpe, Poetz & Sauermann, 2023).

Researching OIS includes investigating whether, how, and under which conditions applying open and collaborative practices along one or more stages of the scientific research process influences novelty, efficiency, and/or the impact of scientific research, taking a balanced view that recognizes important contingency factors on the individual, organizational, and ecosystem-level. Within this framework, paper presentation sessions at the conference are, among others, related to citizen and crowd science, university-industry collaborations, data/material/infrastructure sharing and reuse, inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations, or scientific networks.