So, let's give the floor now to Eva Mendes.
We'll keep on talking about the same thing,
but this time from the European perspective.
In the role that COARA has been playing on it,
many of you might know COARA, she's
part of the University of Carlos III,
she has also been a Deputy Vice-Rector for the
Strategy of Communication and Digital Transformation,
she's the head of the group of the Open Science Lab Group,
where we have developed several projects of research for open science,
including citizen science as an essential
component inside what we note as open science.
Eva Mendes was also the head of the Open Science Policy
Platform from the European Commission from 2018 until 2020,
and currently she is a member of the
head of the steering committee of COARA.
That is why she will be speaking right
now and be talking about that right now.
Eva, you have the floor.
Now, yes.
Ok, so, mainly due to the simultaneous
translation, I needed the microphone to work.
I'll be speaking in Spanish, but the slides are in English.
I usually talk about this in English, but I think most of the
people here today, even though we're not in the European Parliament,
the audience has the right to be talked
in their own language if possible.
So, first of all, I'd like to congratulate the UNED because
of that consortium of universities that they have created.
They have done the Open EU and they have
the privilege of having that in their name.
They have it as a flagship.
Almost all universities belong to some kind of group, and we're
trying to create an inter-reliance group to work with open science.
But since you have the Open in the title, I'll
leave that there, but I wanted to congratulate you.
I'll handle this or is anyone handling this?
Ok, great.
Well, this was the title of my speech and I bought to it.
I usually get a title and I usually try to make it work for myself,
but I think COARA is not going to change
the way we are going to fund research.
The way we fund research is going to be changed by AI,
just like the way that science is communicated will change.
Even if we don't want to mention it, we don't want to think about
it, but we know that it's going to change our lives so much.
Just like the websites did, but instead of in 30 years, in 3 years.
So, I'd like to talk about some matters with the funders
that are here in COARA, those that have joined this group.
And even though I have not updated the slides, I have the data
from this morning, because we have the foundation UCI-AESA.
And we're going to be talking about the role of the
funders in what we call COARA's coalition, let's say.
The content of the presentation will
start with, let's say, where we started.
We all know about that, but we have to take
into account that we have a public here,
we have an audience that have a great
background on the field of open science.
All my colleagues from Madroño that are here with me know
that, but it's important to reflect on where we started.
And I like to call this the metaphor of the naked emperor.
And I think the translation of this in the Spanish language is
like the invisible tunic of the emperor, something like that.
But I'd like to start with where we
started, how we have developed our path.
And that's from open science to COARA and
talk about why COARA is what it is today.
What are the problems that I am finding from the
steering board that I detect and that we all detect.
And it is important to keep on working on them and what's the role of funders
and what countries have more funders that are linked to the coalition.
And after that, I'd like to create a very interesting reflection
on what open science is in the evaluation of research.
And what's the evaluation of open science like?
Sometimes they're included in the same bag.
But for example, what Susana was talking about,
about ANECA, what we've done in the working group,
and what we have done with the wonderful
steering committee that ANECA has right now,
without them we wouldn't have done so many steps.
Practically, that's an evaluation element in itself, something
that's fascinating for me because I fought for it a lot.
In 2011, we already asked for that.
And something that I do not want to debate about
is open science versus the quality of science.
They don't have anything to do with each other, but for me, open
science is a manifest invitation towards quality, full stop.
But in order to start talking, we need to talk about that.
And what ANECA has done is exactly that, is
to talk about it from the beginning and say,
"Hey, if you're so good at it, let's get it open.
Let's get it open, Axel.
" I don't care if it's good or bad, but it has to be open.
And I think that's one of the best moves
we've done and one of the best options we have
in order to try to understand the new evaluation system.
It's not that the open science is a new milestone for quality,
it has to be the essential foundation for any public
institution or any organisation that's linked to this.
In the end, I'd like to end with some final
thoughts or reflections in this very long way
that we have already talked about in previous talks.
We have a long way ahead of us and there's
many interesting things to discuss.
In this first section that I'll be reflecting on,
I'll talk about how we got from open science to COADA
and how we got from COADA to open science again.
I'd like to start with this tale, as I said. I'm sure you know about it.
And it's also very well known in the field
of research to refer to those things.
And there was a time when the king, the emperor,
in his willingness of having a new suit,
he hired some tailors and said, "Hey,
we're going to create a great tunic.".
And the curious thing about it is that dumb
people will not be able to see the fabric.
And because of their ego, no one wanted
to recognise, no one wanted to acknowledge
that they could not see the fabric until a child gets there.
I usually get this child with a T-shirt
that says "early career researcher"
and that child says, "Hey, but the emperor is naked.
" And that's what happens in reality.
When I teach courses to early career researchers,
they need to make an open contribution of what
open science is for them and what they've learned.
And one of the definitions that I've been
most impacted by, besides my own definition,
which is like an aptitude, manifest invitation to quality, etc.
, the best definition that I've had is what a PhD student said,
and it's open science is what I thought
what science was when I started my thesis.
And that's reality.
And an early career researcher has had
to be the one to tell us what reality is.
The Q1, Q3, Q4, we've got naked science, we
have the naked emperor in front of our eyes,
and there is no correlation between the quality of these quotes
and all the matters that we all know from the library aspect.
However, no one will dare to say that it's not the case,
because if we do so, some other people will say, "Hey, you're dumb.
How are you going to publish in Q1 or Q2,
and you've received your certification through the previous method?
" And the ANECA now thinks that some people do things
if they're blessed by companies that are looking for profit.
And here there's a call into something we must acknowledge,
that researchers, we've done something that's terrible,
and that is to be intermediaries to a responsibility that is ours.
We have given the responsibility of
achieving our quality to other companies
that are going to evaluate our work when
the responsibility is on the researchers.
And I'm going to embrace some of Manuel Matyski's reflections on it.
He's Polish, and Polish researchers also have intermediary agents,
and they don't really like the system either.
They don't have as much independence as maybe universities in Norway,
and there needs to be an evaluation of science.
This is all the context in which we're placed at,
and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
And what we've done, what we did in the Open Science Policy Platform
at the end of the mandate was to say what we all saw.
And what we all saw was that the emperor is naked.
The true problem is the problem of incentives, lacking them,
mainly when they're linked to criteria,
linked to the quality of journals,
and not to the quality of contributions and the change of the world.
We're supposed to make science to change the world,
but also, unfortunately, we're not researchers from the 19th century
with just a lens looking for butterflies.
This is a human career, and it makes sense that early
career researchers want to have a good position.
It is valid for people to want to have an academic career,
but if that career is based on a matter that is moving away
from that intermediary position and intermediary in science.
And we have ended up doing that with a profit,
and we will end up paying that number again.
First of all, we buy the right to make a publication,
and then we pay for something to say, hey, this is your impact value.
And this has quite a negative aspect or impact in science.
And this has created the extent of the flaw.
Sometimes the guilt is not of the pet,
the guilt is of the owner of the pet
for giving them too much food, right?
So, sometimes I say, hey, I don't want to publish here,
I don't want to publish there. Yeah, that's normal.
So far, that has been because of a matter of prestige, of excellency,
but that has been some kind of behavior
that has created so many problems.
And this is not an affordable system for our science.
It would be great to cut the current system, not to give any more money
to this system, and to create a new system
based on researchers and academia handled by us.
But there's not enough money to keep us here.
When we say that we're in the middle of the transformation,
I'm sorry, but I'm done with transformations.
I want the reforms now.
I don't want to be in the middle of the transformation.
And I think that transformation is not such, if we're not aware
that the system has a lot of problems and it has generated behaviors
such as this, it's something that has appeared in the press,
and Spanish people in the audience know about this,
publicized early researchers and number of
publications that a person does in three days.
This is absurd from the point of view of
rationality of how science should be developed.
And something else that was also fascinating for me
was the fact that parents name scientific articles of their child
since they were five years old so that they had merits.
That's great, I have a 10-year-old
boy, I'll start naming my publications
in his name and when he's 25, he'll have so many.
This is so absurd and I'm sorry to be so sarcastic
about this, but we have created this monster.
And this has to do with the fact that science is rotting on us
in a system in which we must fight because we're living off of it.
And very often we make it legitimate for people to say,
for an intern to say, "Hey, just write my name on it.
" And it's something that early career researchers,
for them they need to get some experience and gain
experience, but the problem is on the seniors.
Because all of us, to a certain extent, we have all had some success,
we know how things work, we know how it works when I quote you,
you quote me, we know how the system works, but we say no,
we keep this because of the early career researchers
and they're so happy to share, to publicize everything
so that their peers review them without any kind of intermediary agent.
Of course, this has a very, very high cost.
This morning we were talking about the
cost of the transformational agreement
that they have created with Elsevier, 14 million Euros.
And let me tell you about the numbers in Spain,
170 million that we used to pay for scientific publishers.
This is known by everyone.
Of course, what we spend in paying APCs
besides the transformation agreements that for me are scams.
It's a kind of scam that happens in this business model.
So, besides this kind of agreements, we also
pay in this study made by Stephen
Hudson, 1 billion Euros just to publish.
Besides everything that we have paid before.
This is unsustainable and it's something
that can't be sustained by researchers.
We are in this position of the evolution of science.
Why does COARA start?
It started from a need.
This morning when the Swedish presidency
had the presidency in the 2023,
and Spain also shared that presidency for that same year,
we shared the presidency of the Council,
and every time that there is one, we love to
make videos and statements and everything.
I really like the one in 2016, 8 years ago, that's been enough time.
And now it's the call for action.
Then we had the European presidency
for the Council, we made a video, etc.
And in the end, we ended up saying, "And you, what are you going to do?"
What they said in that video is that we
all agree that we need to change the way
that we have an evaluation of science.
If we are all seeing the naked emperor, why don't we say it?
So, what is COARA then?
COARA is just the impact of the frustration.
When we did an analysis of what stakeholders did,
we realized that the bottleneck was the system for incentives
and assistance that researchers have in
order to grow in that academic career.
Either we change this or we will not make open science.
We will keep on negotiating and we will be scam makers and say,
"Hey, I'm going to pay you 10, I'm going to pay you 20.
" We change the agreement, but we keep on playing.
But the reality is that in order to stop
being tricksters and to stop playing,
researchers have to be the ones in charge,
and they have to be in charge of infrastructure.
And of course, this did not start just making another statement.
I don't know if you are familiar with this document.
It's an inventory made by some Dutch colleagues,
and there's more than 140 statements.
In fact, the Barcelona Statement on the
Metadata and Infrastructures of Data,
that's from Open Science, these are statements,
and statements are just, let's say, a toast to the sun.
We all agree in saying that we need to have an open
science for society that is paying for this, etc.
But these all are statements that in the
end, we could sign, but nothing happened.
So, we realized that what we actually
had to do was to create at least a system to share experiences.
This, that never actually got done, was
the first idea that started before COARA,
and this was the RAR, the Research Assessment Resource or Registry,
which would be now the Action Plan database.
Tell me what you're doing right in order
to do it better, and I'll copy you,
or let's share experiences, let's do something together.
And in that effort, we realized that principles are quite clear.
We have the DORA statement, we have the manifestos,
we have the comprehensible setting for other researchers, etc.
But what we actually needed was to create a coalition, a group,
in which we could start this so that no one would be ashamed to join.
For that, in April this year, we have gone one step further,
which has been the Barcelona Declaration that
only extends the 10th principle of COARA,
which is let's use open sources and let's
control the sources that we are using.
But COARA is just, on the one hand, an
agreement, the ARRA, the Toast to the Sun,
principles, we all agree on this, let's use this, let's use that,
these are going to be the qualitative indicators, blah, blah, blah.
We're going to use all kinds of contributions,
not only publications in X journals,
and let's look for a reasonable way to use indicators,
not as an absolute proxy for quality, because
it's not like that, nothing is absolute.
And beyond that agreement, in which we
all agree, we also have a community.
COARA has the agreement, which is
called ARRA, but COARA is the coalition,
it's the coalition of all the people who,
together, want to at least move the system
to evaluate science so that it can improve on a world level.
And right now, what COARA has is 863 member organizations.
We are members on an institutional level.
As a member, I am a member of COARA, but not as Eva Mendes.
I'm a member of COARA because my institution
once adhered to this coalition to say, "Hey, what do we do together?
" Aneka also joined this, and other different actors have joined.
Specifically, which was the focus of
this presentation, out of the funders,
there is a 7% of COARA members that are funders.
I always say that funders have a lot of
power in the change of systems of research,
in the change of incentives, because they can apply the golden rule,
which is that the one that has the gold, that's the rule.
And since they are the ones with the money, they say,
"Hey, I want this money from Europe Horizon,
so you have to publish open access.
" "Oh, we're not going to access to hybrid publications.
" "Okay, you don't have the fair rules,
okay, then we're not going to fund this.
" There's many rules that appear in this
context, but this is not absolute,
because the evaluation does not go only through funding.
And there's different disciplines that
don't really want to use European money.
If we look at a framework in any university
or public institution for research,
how many researchers are accessing European money?
That's a high amount, but not all
researchers are in the way to receive money.
Of course, research has to be funded, but mostly
the researcher career is an individual
task, it's an individual enterprise.
That's why the role of agencies for evaluation are so important,
or the role of institutions, they have their own
willingness to choose the criteria that they will use.
If we take a look at Guara from the point
of view of members, Spain is the winner.
We have 80 Spanish institutions, I get jokes in the steering boards,
"Because you're doing championing.
" "No, I'm not doing any championing.
" The moment Aneka signed for it, everyone joined.
And what's the significance of this?
Haven't you realized the four countries that have the most members?
It's Spain, Italy, Portugal and France.
And precisely, it's the countries on
the European level that have an agency, that have intermediaries.
Isn't that significant?
It's an indicator of the frustration of not having
a possibility of doing a scientific evaluation,
tailor-made for institutions, and to have a
national organization that does the evaluation.
That's why it's so important that that national
organization that creates that, the
Aneka, is on the side of the change.
If we didn't have that, it would not be possible.
And if we take a look at a country level,
we have now members in all continents.
But one of the main problems that we see when it comes to Guara's context
is that it's still a very European initiative.
Everyone thinks, and when we invited NASA in
the National American Year of the Open Science,
we invited NASA to one of the Guara's General Assembly,
and I had to explain to the person who was going to be speaking,
it's not a European project, it's not Guara.
eu, it's Guara.org, but Guara.org takes it to Guara.eu.
So, they think that it's a European project,
but it is a world project that has had the
situation that it has brought in Europe
because the European Commission is perfectly aware
of the need of creating an action commission.
that will allow to introduce changes so
that they can be shared after some luring,
because when there's something that works, that gets implemented.
And if that is not being shared, that will not be done.
We only have two members in Australia, one has joined this week,
which is a funding agency for medicine,
I think that's very significant,
because there in Australia, the funding agencies
do have that filter kind of possibility,
which is filtering the researchers when it comes to researcher.
When it comes to individualism, it's quite cruel,
and it's fighting for individual career when science is global.
These are some of the reflections that I see that are harder to do,
from this understanding that it has to be a global initiative.
When it comes to the funders, the members of the Commission,
we have 47 members, 47 institutions that are in the funders category,
five in Denmark and Sweden, three in
Spain, Netherlands, France and Ireland.
In Spain, this morning I've had the data
updated, and we've got the fourth funder,
and together with the institution from Aragon for development,
the Carlos III and the Seneca Foundation,
we've also had La Caixa Foundation,
which is private, and I think that has an important significance.
The fact that we have four funding agents, for me and for Susana,
and for everyone who's in the, let's
say, context of scientific evaluation,
it would be much easier if the Spanish Agency for Research was joining,
and we would all be in the same path.
I don't understand, because they have signed
DORA, and the DORA principles are the same thing.
The only difference that we have is that
it's precisely that practical intention
of creating an action plan, a series of
initiatives that can be implemented in DORA.
You're not obliged, let's say, to do something,
but it does not force you to have an action plan,
and COADA does force you to have an action plan.
So I would say that it would be more
important if we had all the funding
agencies on our side that would contribute.
And some fields where they are going to evaluate people.
I'm thinking about Ramón y Cajal and
other institutions that might be important regarding these principles.
Nowadays, our dream of the Open Science Policy Platform,
and it was all girls when we set up this in the middle of the pandemic,
and we are going to create some experiences,
and it's the fact that we have done some action plans.
On Friday, there were 103 action plans published.
Almost 700 members, so that's a long way to go yet.
But it was very hard to do 39 or the 41st ones.
But over the last months, we have gotten to 103.
So I want to assess, just like the law of the 101 days,
and I wanted to assess the first 101 first action plans.
From what I've seen, there are some that I really like,
for example, the one from the University of Stackley,
but the situation of each country is different.
In the UK, they have the RER, something that motivates them.
It's also the point of where are we willing to go.
We were waiting to see what Aneka was doing.
From now on, there will be many more, I would hope so.
I think some Spanish universities have presented their plan,
but let's see also what the funders' plan is.
I have not seen anything like that yet.
What are they going to do for COARA to promote it in the rankings,
to promote the qualitative evaluation in
order to include a contribution to society
more than the contribution to publication, and that's important.
Something else that's really important
that I want you to take into account,
because I think almost all institutions that
are represented here are members of COARA.
Who's not a member of COARA here, institutionally?
Some of you who still are not members,
take into account that the moment
in which your institution becomes a member,
it is important that you start working groups.
Why are working groups so important?
Because it's a way to create action groups and
different motivators for our own behaviors.
For me, the working group for multilingualism is essential.
So, with regards to what we heard this morning is important,
because if you are studying a philology
or studies from the Finnish language,
why should you publish in English?
Just because there's no Finnish journal in that classification system.
And for me, it's also crucial to have the working
group for the responsible metrics and indicators.
Why? Because if we don't create alternative indicators,
what do you think the investigators are going to write in their CV?
They write in letters the impact value.
For example, I have 17 publications in this,
but if we don't give them alternatives,
and if they are possible indicators,
we can create that with open science.
Also, the early career researchers had a great proposal.
They are the young researchers, where we
have the Eurodog, the Global Young Academy.
It's the people who actually want to change the
system, because they want to change their world,
the world of their own investigations.
And the group of open infrastructure,
where we have different projects,
we have PENALEX, we have POKIN in Australia, we
have US, we have an internationalization there,
and precisely last week they met in the Sorbonne to
analyze the capacity that open infrastructures have
in order to create measurement mechanisms for the open science.
National mechanisms are important, and they are essential.
At first, there was a debate on whether this
was a global initiative, should it be
global, can't we just do it nationally?
But I've been one of the main defenders of the national chapters,
because the situation in each country is different.
It's not the same to have an evaluation
in Spain than in the Netherlands.
It's not the same to have an evaluation in Paraguay and in the US.
If we want a global initiative, we need to
listen to individual realities from each
country and see how to improve them.
Now we have a new national chapter, which is
Andorra, and I feel quite emotional about them,
because for smaller countries it's much easier to
create an evaluation policy in Andorra or Uruguay
to have 3 million inhabitants than in China or the US.
These kind of things are essential,
and I think we need to learn about it.
In reflection of what open science is in COARA and in the ARRA,
COARA started with the motivation of creating
open science and making it a reality,
but that does not mean that COARA just focuses on open science.
It's a necessary element in COARA, because it will
be the conclusion of having a new evaluation system,
because we will need to have a more open science.
But we are only talking about taking into account open science practices,
just like what ANECA has done, to put
publications by default, not as a quality proxy,
but as an administration thing that has to be there,
to assess different skills, including open science.
When we talk about the diversity of indicators,
we are explicitly mentioning the open science,
but just something that was created by the open
science framework in order to create alternatives,
or to consider open science the UNESCO recommendation
of the fundamental regulation of all this context.
If we think about open science in research, we need
to think about indicators that are measuring matters
related to open science, but they have
to do with quality, with transparency,
and with choosing a new system of science research.
This is one of the indicators that has
been mentioned in their blog recently,
to measure the pre-registration of studies.
It's one of the practices in open science that links
the willingness of keeping transparency of a study,
so that the study does not change their
hypothesis because the results changed.
Because this, unfortunately, because the end justifies the means,
if the end is publishing, that sometimes happens,
when we have a lack of possibility to reproduce science,
making up data and pre-registration is a
manifest indication of that transparency.
And if we talk about measuring open science,
not so that open science is measurable in a CV,
we need to do what is called the monitoring of open science.
And I always like to quote when we talk about
the practices of open science in research,
Susanna was talking about this document,
the room for everyone's talent,
that was done in the context of rectors in the Netherlands,
she is still the rector of Maastricht,
but she is the president of Goada,
she said that we had to assess open science as an evaluation criteria,
as an aptitude, as a skill, if everything is open,
that implies that you are giving value to the openness of quality.
And mostly, something that I love, it's
moving from work pressure to work pleasure,
because right now, researchers, mainly PhD
students are quite pressed by the system,
they are very pressed on when to publish, how to publish in wartime,
because if they don't do that, they are left out of the system,
and science should be a system of pleasure,
of knowledge and to change the world.
And this is the idea of room for everyone's
talent, because not everyone has to have 18 Q1s,
maybe you are great at doing citizen science,
maybe you are very good in Finnish studies,
and you don't have any Q1, but that does not mean
that we only should have room for those that publish.
I always say that if you over-stimulate an
incentive, you are de-stimulating explicitly.
Another one, five years have to move, have to gone by,
if you have to be teaching for five
years, if you don't kill any student,
they will give it to you for the six-year period,
you have to publish in this journal, whatever.
The other one that is given by default to
me, I would take away six-year periods,
I would do just that as an administration issue, so
that they are not so competitive and so expensive,
so that it would be just saying, hey,
if you do your work for six years, if you don't publish six things in
five years, let's just forget about it.
It's just like teaching, maybe you did not kill
a student, but if you did not publish here,
that should be something that unfortunately did not happen.
Sorry, Susana, I'm getting in your topic,
I'm talking about the European Initiative,
but unfortunately six-year periods in Spain are a retributed
compliment and a consolation prize when you get old.
What do you think I want to be, 25
years or to have six six-year periods?
I want to be 25, but I'm 50 and I have four
six-year periods and I will say that a lot.
That's the monster we've created and
we have created in Spain specifically,
because we're legitimizing our academic career with time.
Obviously, it's logical, it means
maturity, it means academic maturity,
but we have to give more importance to the publications
of young people than publications of seniors.
I remember when the working group we had a doubt
or a consultation from a student that said,
hey, young people have more problems getting our first six-year period.
The first six-year period is the one that
you'll use the most over your whole life.
That's the one that takes more effort and
it's when you're 100% being productive.
Okay, thank you.
But it's a lot of debates that we've had with early career researchers
and the dramatic factor of the system is
what makes us keep on working, contributing.
We don't know where we're going to end, but institutions,
at least the Spanish ones, have joined ANECA.
And of course, when we want to talk about indicators that are going
to have an evaluation of open science in the field of research,
we have some. And for example, in the Norwegian
field, for example, the NORDCAM, what they've done,
that is to nationalize the career assessment matrix,
that's a matrix for the evaluation of scientific careers
based in principles of open science, to
nationalize it to the Norwegian context.
And that has been great. The UFAIR, our own alliance, we did that.
We nationalized, or let's say internationalized, our
criteria on that matrix that open science evaluates
in order to have an evaluation of young
researchers, not to change the whole system,
but to have an evaluation of the postdoc, to
say that we gave grants among our systems.
That's pilots that we create in specific contexts in
which evaluation does not take you to the national level,
it's the evaluation of young researchers, or how
we're going to pay the own program of a university.
That's the kind of pilot project we should
do, because the others do not depend on us.
And when we talk about monetizing or implementing open
science, of course, from the Pathos European Institute,
we have options and we also have a French initiative that
is very coherent when it comes to implementing open science,
and that has generated a monetarization of this implementation.
And declaration number 141, this toast to the sun thing, and
that's the principles on the monetarization of open science.
This will give us a lot of hints on how open science
works, and I think they are working with each other.
The monitoring of open science as a practical implementation,
and from that duality we could also have indicators.
But let me in these last minutes to make some
reflections on how I see the situation right now,
of what concerns me in the concept of
the implementation of open science,
and that is precisely the challenges on an
institutional level are the constitutional elements,
and the evaluation is one of the constitutional elements
from the whole change towards what we call in the program.
Open Science Ready Institutions, in the skills EOSC
program, institutions that are prepared to be open science.
That's on an institutional level what I call "darling
we need to talk", and the "darling we need to talk",
because that's one of the sentences that
I did make quite famous in my rector team,
because I took the hand of the rector
and I said "hey darling we need to talk".
That allows for changes to be implemented.
We need to talk about policies that
are internal on an institutional level.
COARA means institutional changes, we look for new
institutional practices and the bravery to do so,
taking a step forward and changing the situation.
And something else that seems essential is that we need to
prove, that's why I talk about monitoring open science so much,
we need to prove the impact of the openness,
and that impact is precisely to prove that,
that openness is an explicit invitation to quality.
When we did MOOCs in the University of
Carlos III, if I teach a class in Carlos III,
I may be six hours there with a three minute slide presentation,
and no one cares about that, and why?
Because there is not that explicit invitation to quality.
Let's think that researchers themselves want to have a good work done,
sometimes they have to make up that data for that published appearance,
which is much stronger than having that
explicit invitation towards quality.
And this is my most famous slide, which is the motivators of will.
Why do investigators work? Because of money,
because of the law and because of the ranking.
That's why the funders role is so important,
because whoever has the goal sets the rule,
the law, because yes, in the Spanish
regulation we have in the article 37,
we could take into account the practice of
the open science for scientific evaluation,
and when the ANECA implemented that principle
for the law is when everyone starts to publish.
Library workers here were out of their minds with the six year periods,
because everyone thought it was a very good idea at the same time,
and then the rankings, we all are against
rankings, but we all love to put things in order.
The highly charged researchers, for example, first, second and third,
the JCR, the first, second and third journal,
the first, second and third university.
It's absolutely exhausting.
But there is another motivator of will that I
think is essential, which is seduction, luring.
And that is that when things work, they get
implemented without anyone needing to impose that,
not the law, not the funder, not the ranking.
When something is important, it gets implemented because of seduction.
And I, for example, think that at some
point, in the same way that we now say,
"Hey, do you remember when we used to
search in Alta Vista in the Internet?
" You're old enough to remember this.
I tell this to my PhD students, and they don't
really know if there was anything before Google.
I used to search online, I used to search in Alta Vista.
Some people might laugh about Alta Vista now, and maybe in a moment,
some people will laugh about, "Hey, do you remember
when we evaluated science with the impact factor?
" Because we will have something better, and that will be seduction.
And that seduction starts with the
collective work of the COARA collection,
because of technology, because of AI, because of
sharing data, because of creating open infrastructure.
And we're working towards that seduction, but we need a new system.
It's not only saying, "Hey, we're not going to evaluate
with the impact factor, but give me something else.
How are we going to make an evaluation?
" We need to have new seducing factors.
And let me share this proposal, because
it's from my colleague, Emanuel Kulczyski,
which is to tattoo the whole book in your body,
because he creates such a good quality reflection in the last pages.
It's whether we improve the metrics and
how they're used, or we stop using metrics.
These are the two only logical answers.
But he also talks about an intermediate
answer, which is what COARA creates.
And that is using the metrics in, let's say, a
reasonable way, whenever they might be useful.
And to stop using metrics in such an obsessive way and predominant way.
And in these principles, towards that third
intermediate answer, not white and not black,
but a tone, a shade of grey, and it's that
the academic career needs to attract the best.
The system for merit is not just the one who gets to these publications,
those who count the dots and get there,
but a system that motivates the best.
Of course, talking about funders, we need to
increase funding that is being done for research.
We are giving peanuts.
Why is the funders' role so important, and
why do we have so many evaluation systems?
We evaluate again, they evaluate the PI, they evaluate the project,
because there's not enough money for everyone.
If we had enough money for everyone, if
Spain had, only through the passing of time,
we give them the chair and we give them
15 million Euros so that you can research,
if we had enough money, the evaluation
systems would not be so restrictive.
We are generating systems for competitivity
that don't always lead to being competent.
And, of course, ensuring a stable
academic career for young researchers,
because if we don't have that, we can't have a
critical mass of people who believe in the system.
We have to de-individualize the assessment,
something that for me is essential.
I think it's a lot more important to
legitimize the role of the research group
than measuring the individuality of the researcher.
And also, the two main important points is
to give back to the academy the control, the quality of what they do.
Think that when I talk to professionals and senior researchers,
that there's always some senior that says,
"Hey, Eva, but good journals are good journals.
" And to whom? For the publisher.
There's not good journals or bad journals,
there are good and bad researchers.
And what gives legitimization to the journal is peer review.
If they have great success, they can't be
better if there is no peer review of that.
If there's not a peer review, then it's even free.
And that's something that I wanted to
talk about and we'll be talking about.
And of course, the fact that if metrics are
part of the research, the data needs to be open.
That's the statement or the declaration of Barcelona.
If we're going to give some data for the evaluation,
for the assessment, that has to be open for everyone.
I always say this to the researchers.
For example, web of science, we have it, we all have it.
And the web of science, that does not come with Windows included.
We all pay that in all countries.
So, let's agree that what we need is to
look for a system, not that we all have,
but the science that the scientific system internationally agrees
that it only works if it's outside of a black box.
And that's putting science again back in the hands of the researchers
and the scientific communication in the hands of the researchers.
And I want to end with this, with my essential UCE calendar.
If science is not open, it's not going to help us.
It's a parachute message.
And if we really want to work on it, but if we are not going to open it,
it's not going to help us if it's inside of black boxes
and inside of payment barriers with the
access of the scientific documentation.
Thank you very much.