News Story

KMi becomes a partner in new EU-funded project on Open Science and cumulative advantage: ON-MERRIT

Nancy Pontika, Tuesday 10 Sep 2019

Success in research and innovation should primarily build and depend on clarity of thought, innovation of ideas, and integrity of processes, rather than on external factors like prior reputation or levels of resources.

Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation aim to bring equity and inclusivity to research. Yet could policy interventions in these directions actually worsen existing inequalities?

ON-MERRIT studies „Matthew effects“ of cumulative advantage in Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation across research, industry and policy-making, through a mix of sociological, bibliometric and computational approaches.

Where we discover such effects at play, we will make policy-recommendations to mitigate or negate these effects.

Dr. Petr Knoth explains: “ON-MERRIT will help us to better understand the flaws of the axiomatically established indicator-based incentives system that is currently deeply driving academic practice. This understanding will enable us to apply data-driven approaches to seek new counter-measures that reward based on merit and incentivise good research practices, such as reproducibility, transparent research workflows, and open research data and software sharing. The project will build on the expertise acquired by the Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics (BSDTAG) group in the area of open science and big data analytics which has been developed through a series of KMi projects supporting the CORE (core.ac.uk) service over the last 8 years.”

ON-MERRIT will be launched in October 2019 and runs until March 2022, with total funding of 1 million Euros from the EC’s Horizon 2020 programme.

Partner Consortium

KNOW-CENTER GMBH – Research Center For Data-Driven Business & Big Data Analytics, Graz (AT)
TU Graz – Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science, Graz (AT)
THE OPEN UNIVERSITY – Knowledge Media Institute (UK)
UNIVERSIDADE DO MINHO – Minho (PT)
GEORG-AUGUST-UNIVERSITÄT GÖTTINGEN – Göttingen State and University Library (DE)