Canadian Science Policy Conference 2015

Organized by International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Technology and Innovation

Widespread access to the Internet is opening up new opportunities for innovation and scientific discovery. At the same time, online science platforms and network tools are reorganizing scientific practices and collaboration, allowing initiatives such as, crowd sourced data collection, citizen science, open access to research results, open educational resources,and open research data to converge.

The result is the growing trend of open science, which promises to speed up the process of discovery, while making research more transparent and reproducible. There is also growing support that publicly funded research should be publicly accessible and that open access and open data could maximize return on research investment through more inclusive and open innovation and other unintended benefits, while empowering citizens to be active knowledge seekers and knowledge producers. The recently announced Tri-Agency policy on Open Access and the government of Canada’s commitment to Open Science are clear signal of this converging trend.

In the development context, open science promises additional benefits, including the equitable participation of researchers from the global South, and the potential of more inclusive ways of knowing, as well as the equitable contribution by Southern researchers in both the framing and the search for solutions to relevant problems that have local impact.

Several advances and innovations, for instance in the field of mobile-health (m-health), have been driven by organizations from the global South where mobile connectivity is growing, offering opportunities to expand the reach of overburdened healthcare systems. Local participatory research such as that conducted by the New Rice for Africa (NERICA) project involved farmers at all stages and accelerated the experimentation phase to get improved crops out of the laboratory and into large-scale production by an average of seven years.

It is against this background that the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet) was launched in July, 2014. Funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre and United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, the OCSDNet’s main objective is to gather evidence on whether, and if so how, open science could lead to new thinking and locally driven innovations for addressing persistent development challenges.

The proposed panel is designed to stimulate debate about the implications of open models of scientific practices for innovation in the contexts of both developing and developed countries, and to highlight how Canadian researchers are engaging in these issues. Key opportunities, including incentive and institutional and policy frameworks, will also be debated