We, the CIVIS community of scholars, hereby declare our commitment to the values of Open Science. To reach CIVIS’s goal of making teaching and research as open as possible, as is stated in CIVIS’s Mission statement, we commit to openly sharing the products of our research and scholarship, and therefore state the following:
Research Indicators and Next-Generation Metrics in support of Open Science
CIVIS universities promote the development of new research indicators to complement the conventional indicators for research quality and impact, so as to do justice to open science practices and, going beyond pure bibliometric indicators, to promote also non-bibliometric research products. In particular, the metrics should extend the conventional bibliometric indicators in order to cover new forms of research outputs, such as research data and research software.
CIVIS universities encourage more responsible approaches to the use of metrics to improve research assessment in support of Open Science.
Incentives and Rewards for researchers to engage in Open Science activities
Research career evaluation systems should fully acknowledge open science activities. CIVIS members encourage the inclusion of Open Science practices in their assessment mechanisms for rewards, promotion, and/or tenure, along with the Open Science Career Assessment Matrix.
FAIR Data
As research data continue to increase in volume, complexity, and creation speed, the FAIR principles 4 aim to provide guidelines to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Re-use of data. Each FAIR principle consists of a set of characteristics that data and metadata must have in order to facilitate their discovery and use by both humans and machines.
CIVIS universities promote the FAIR principles, support their researchers to make their data FAIR and provide their researchers with the appropriate infrastructure and guidance for describing, storing, and sharing their data.
Future of scholarly communication
The CIVIS universities support the Open Access Transformation in scholarly communication. In doing so, they are involved in the various forms of Open Access: open access publications, institutional repositories, open-source software, open publishing platforms. They also support efforts to preserve all the actors of the publishing value chain, according to
the principle of bibliodiversity developed in the Jussieu Call. All publications produced in the context of the CIVIS project should be available in Open Access, in compliance with the national legislation concerning intellectual property rights (IPR).
Open educational resources
CIVIS universities encourage the development and use of open educational resources (OER) by its members and support the CIVIS academic community by providing training about OER
design, IPR, open licenses, etc. Incentives for enhancing cooperation among CIVIS members for joint OER development should be provided, mainly by sharing OER support services & infrastructure (learning management systems, platforms, applications, tools). All educational material produced within the CIVIS project should be provided as OER. CIVIS contributes to the open education movement by opening selected courses and other educational resources to the general public.
Collaboration with society
The CIVIS universities promote open science in all its aspects and therefore spread the knowledge to the general public by supporting citizen science initiatives. A key goal is to increase the public's awareness of open science in order to gain access and contribute to research, and to develop several forms of collaboration between academia and the general public.
CIVIS is committed to the development of Open Science. Our universities collaborate and exchange best practices along the points included in this statement, and the implementation of open science as a way forward for the future of European universities. This statement is consistent with the EU’s open science policy 6 developed by the European Commission, including the EOSC initiative