OIS Research Conference 2021

The year 2020 was challenging in many ways, especially due to the COVID-19 outbreak. But we were also able to see the power of openness and collaboration in science and science-based innovation: Never before has humanity developed, tested, and manufactured multiple effective vaccines in less than a year. Developments like these highlight the importance of understanding the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of applying open and collaborative practices along the entire process of generating and disseminating scientific research.

Therefore, the 2021 OIS Research Conference continued to

• inspire discussions around an integrated and contingent view on the role and value of openness and collaboration in the context of science,
• connect researchers across various disciplines, and
• link different streams of research on open and collaborative science as well as science-based innovation.

Starting out with a keynote by Hila Lifshitz-Assaf (NYU and Harvard University) on “Openness and Collaboration in Scientific Research: From NASA, to Crowds and AI”, conference participants presented and discussed 17 ongoing research projects on various aspects of OIS and learned about five cutting-edge OIS cases and applications. Furthermore, the conference featured an OIS Debate on the potentials of Citizen Science beyond its usual scope of application with Kevin Crowston (Syracuse University), Marisa Ponti (University of Gothenburg) and Jacob Sherson (Aarhus University) as panelists.

Continuing to walk the talk, conference participants engaged in another OIS experiment: This time, we experimented with a novel format to setting research agendas and prototyped a novel approach for co-developing research proposals: As an inspiration to develop use-inspired basic research (Stokes, 1997) in science and innovation studies, scientists from other fields (quantum and antimatter physics, neuroscience, human rights, radiopharmacy and nuclear medicine, biomedical engineering) shared the challenges they had faced when practicing OIS, i.e., when they applied open and collaborative approaches in one or more stages of their own research. Building on these “problem pitches”, conference participants co-created novel research proposals and later summarized and analyzed the outcomes in a collaboratively written article that was later published in the CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation (CIJ).

In a fully virtual social program, conference participants were additionally invited to join a science comedy session, get their personal OIS Research Conference caricature, virtually explore the CERN Antimatter space or simply hang-out, e-meet other participants and chat via gather.town.

To get an impression of the OIS Research Conference 2021 and learn more about the different sessions, check out the video and the download materials on this page.