Rebecca Lawrence is Managing Director of F1000, providers of a series of tools and services to support the research community in writing, publishing, discovering and evaluating new scientific findings. She was responsible for the launch of the novel open science publishing platform F1000Research. She has subsequently led the initiative behind the recent launches of Wellcome Open Research, Gates Open Research, and many other funder- and institution-based publishing platforms that aim to start a new trajectory in the way scientific findings and data are communicated and ultimately research and researchers are evaluated.

She is a member of the European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform, chairing their work on next-generation indicators and their integrated advice: OSPP-REC, and is a member of the US National Academies (NASEM) Committee on Advanced and Automated Workflows. She has been a co-Chair of a number working groups focussing on data and peer review, for organisations including the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and ORCID. She is also an Advisory Board member for DORA (the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and for the data policy and standards initiative, FAIRsharing. She has worked in STM publishing for almost 20 years for several publishers including Elsevier where she built and ran the Drug Discovery Group. She originally trained and qualified as a pharmacist, and holds a PhD in Cardiovascular Pharmacology.

Presentation: Shifting the research assessment system to enable the adoption of open knowledge practices

While there is much focus in Europe and indeed globally to encourage the adoption of open science and open knowledge practices by the research community, there are several factors that make it hard for researchers and the broader community to truly embrace such a change. Chief amongst these are the way that researchers are incentivized and rewarded, and the indicators used to support decisions on career progression, and research and institutional funding. Following the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science in 2016, the European Commission set up the Open Science Policy Platform, a cross-stakeholder group from across Europe, to work together to drive coordinated action to create a step-change in all the main areas of open science. Rebecca will describe some of work of this group, and other related initiatives around Europe, with a particular focus on efforts to address the until now intractable challenge of implementing frameworks and alternative approaches to research assessment that incentivize open knowledge practices across the research ecosystem.