Eleonora Colangelo reports from a UNESCO-hosted strategic event on open science monitoring and impact held in Paris
On July 7–8, 2025, UNESCO hosted a strategic event on Open Science monitoring and impact, organised with PathOS, European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Track, the Open Science Monitoring Initiative (OSMI), and OpenAIRE.
The conference provided a platform to examine governance instruments, test new methodologies, and discuss implementation pathways. What follows distils the main discussions from the event and the strategic priorities they suggest, which readers may further explore by consulting the full session recordings.
Enablers, co-creation, causality served as a thematic throughline of the conference. Enablers were examined as the means by which open science is made both actionable and measurable; while co-creation emerged as a necessary condition for policy legitimacy, and causality as central to impact assessment, prompting a move beyond outputs to interrogate how, where, and for whom open science delivers value. These concepts will continue to shape strategic thinking about open science for the next decade – particularly as Europe begins to define its research and innovation framework for 2028-2034, which will likely determine how openness is embedded into funding and regulation.
Building on this premise, the event opened with a forward-looking tone. Though it marked the conclusion of the EU-funded PathOS project, the focus was not retrospective. Instead, the agenda turned toward integrating validated methodologies into future policy cycles and broadening their adoption across different governance systems. Four organising threads inspired the overall proceedings.
Monitoring as governance
A recurring insight was the reframing of monitoring — that is, the tracking of how national systems adopt and implement Open Science practices, from open access publishing to data sharing and citizen science. No longer a technocratic afterthought, monitoring is being redefined as a strategic governance tool to align values, reinforce trust, and enable system-level change. The Open Science Monitoring Initiative (OSMI) was presented as a key vehicle for this shift. Emerging from a global consultation process led by UNESCO and initiated by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, OSMI has resulted in a set of internationally endorsed principles – published shortly after the conference – that offer a flexible, modular framework for monitoring. These principles emphasise relevance, transparency, and responsible use, and are designed to support national systems. Prioritising trust, inclusivity, and national readiness over reductive metrics, the OSMI represents a marked departure from legacy approaches. “We are not here to reproduce the H-index,” said OSMI’s co-lead Laetitia Bracco. “We are here to build trust.” That statement crystallised a wider epistemic shift in how monitoring is understood not as passive data collection, but as a negotiation of accountability, value, and knowledge-politics.
Generative causality, not just impact
The PathOS project, coordinated by Ioanna Grypari, captured this move. Designed to map how open science practices – such as open access, FAIR data, and open software – translate into societal outcomes, PathOS moved beyond the “whether” to interrogate the “how.” Its outputs, condensed in this practical handbook, include 55 operational indicators, a logic model grounded in Helen Longino’s epistemology of participatory knowledge, and a cost–benefit analysis framework built for policy application. More significantly, PathOS offered a conceptual breakthrough: that impact of open science is rarely linear, be it academic, economic and societal. It is contextual, contingent, and often invisible. The mantra heard repeatedly throughout the conference – “culture beats code” – captured the essence. Behavioural change, not technical compliance, is the true amplifier of openness. PathOS’ use of mixed methods (literature reviews, stakeholder interviews, and AI-supported analysis) reinforced this insight: quantification matters only when it captures lived complexity.
Economic logic without economism
The discussion extended into the economic domain. The Costs & Benefits Analysis (CBA) framework, presented by Jessica Catalano (CSIL), exemplified how open science can be evaluated without falling into economistic reduction. Rather than isolating return-on-investment, the analysis accounted for distributed, non-linear value, such as time savings, research acceleration and innovation translation. Case studies made this concrete. UniProt, a €14.6 million/year protein database, was shown to yield over €500 million in labour and time savings – 20% of which benefit the private sector. RCAAP, Portugal’s repository aggregator, generated more modest returns too, but revealed how small investments can produce system-wide benefits. These findings, illustrated for both projects in this study, do more than justify spending: they provide policymakers with tools to link open science to long-term public value. The implicit message for publishers is clear: a commitment is needed to new frameworks for recognising value, particularly around reproducibility, data reuse, and community-governed platforms allowing for accountable CBAs.
Economic framing, however, cannot be decoupled from global inequalities. Contributions from low- and middle-income countries foregrounded enduring disparities in infrastructure, regulation, and capacity. “Open Science must be inclusive by design, not just by aspiration”, said Cécile Ouattara-Coulibaly (Virtual University of Côte d’Ivoire). UNESCO’s 2021 Recommendation on Open Science, as presented by Rania Sabo (UNESCO), makes equity and diversity foundational. Yet implementation remains uneven, constrained by underfunding, skill gaps, and policy fragmentation. The enhanced EOSC Observatory, illustrated by Tereza Szybisty (OpenAIRE MAKE), could work as a promising corrective. By combining statistical data with narrative reporting (here, all files resulted from the EOSC work), it allows countries to define their own trajectories rather than being held to EU-centric benchmarks. Monitoring, in this vision, facilitates knowledge and sources.
Research assessment as leverage
It emerged as another high-stakes policy frontier, as also highlighted by the presentation of the OPUS project’s pilots. Natalia Manola (OpenAIRE MAKE) reframed assessment as a governance instrument, arguing that it must align values with recognition and reward systems. Modular, dynamic frameworks tailored to national contexts, not externally imposed models, are needed. For publishers, this opens a dual responsibility: to support transparency and diverse contributions while resisting over-reliance on mere legacy metrics in order to be trusted voices in the research assessment debates.
Reflections beyond topics and names
The broader philosophical turn of the conference was clear. As captured in the first Slido poll launched at the beginning of the conference (“What do we tend to overlook in Open Science evaluation?”) responses gravitated toward people, quality, sustainability, time, and care. These are less noise in the system than signals of what knowledge shifts are asking from policy frameworks.
One of the most striking conceptual insights was the use of counterfactual reasoning: What if open science didn’t exist? Would we see the same data availability? The same speed of collaboration? The same visibility or efficiency in publishing? The evidence suggests otherwise. Framing open science’s value in terms of what would be lost in its absence sharpened the policy rationale, particularly in an era of shifting budgetary constraints. Counterfactuals help move the debate from values to evidence.
From a policy-oriented perspective, the next phase is already taking shape. It will involve consolidating what’s working, scaling up the success stories told in the two days, fuelling further national commitments to UNESCO advocacy efforts. It will mean aligning Open Science with broader STI strategies, particularly around infrastructure, security, and funding. And most importantly, it will require turning trust into traceable value, as the CBA analysis did for impact.
But perhaps the most urgent challenge is integration. As Europe prepares its post-2027 R&I agenda, with knowledge envisioned as the “fifth freedom” based on Letta’s report, open science must move from adjacent policy to embedded architecture. Monitoring, funding, assessment, and governance must cohere. In this sense, the frameworks shared in Paris are more than retrospective exercises: they already represent actionable models for strategic policymaking, whose ultimate value will be measured by how effectively they shape long-term funding instruments, standards, and cross-sector cooperation. And the timing is right, as RPOs are now starting to secure fresh funding to scale up open science community-building efforts on the ground.
Eleonora Colangelo is a Public Affairs Officer – External Affairs, at Frontiers
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