Open Research Funders Group Pilots Program to Help Funders Advance Open Policies

The Open Research Funders Group (ORFG), in conjunction with six philanthropies, has successfully concluded a pilot program designed to empower funders to advance open access guidance within their organizations. The success of the project strongly suggests that a guided cohort approach may greatly accelerate the adoption of open policies.

The pilot included representatives from six philanthropies, the American Brain Tumor Association, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Schmidt Futures (also an ORFG member), St. Baldrick’s Foundation, and TSC (Tuberous Sclerosis Complex) Alliance. The Health Research Alliance contributed to the socialization of the program, and four of its members signed on to the project. We launched the program in August of 2021 and then met monthly, providing both structured curriculum and customized advising. Our last group session was held at the end of January 2022, and we are currently scheduling our final 1:1 sessions with cohort members to provide additional support, bring representatives closer to their policy goals, and wind down this first pilot.

All participants are in the process of tangibly advancing open policies within their organizations. For example, sparked in part by one of the homework assignments from the program, one foundation resurfaced their previously ‘dormant’ open science policy and is now in the process of updating it, hoping to make research sharing practices a scorable part of their applications. Another foundation said they had previously been considering an open policy only for their science program, but after internally presenting some ideas gleaned from our curriculum, leadership encouraged them to expand the policy to apply organization-wide. Importantly, many of the proposed policies go beyond article sharing to include other practices such as data and protocol sharing. This is an encouraging development, and suggests we could expand the program curriculum from open access to open research more broadly. 

We believe one of the crucial factors that led to the success of this pilot was the hands-on, engagement-based nature of the program. Cohort members expressed that being able to ask questions and talk through concerns, with both coordinators and peers, was helpful in shaping their thinking. Monthly calls provided regular checkpoints, open email channels meant members could send questions or ask for guidance asynchronously, and 1:1 calls provided opportunities for personalized feedback and support. In the future, it will be important to keep these aspects of the program.

The ORFG plans to recruit another cohort to repeat the program in 2022 with additional funders. In the meantime, we have made the program curriculum and presentations publicly available via Open Science Framework under an open license to allow reuse. We are also thinking about ways we can string homework and readings together in a more structured way that might allow funders to follow along and use these tools independently to develop policy. While we believe that engagement is a crucial element of the program, some funders may not be able to participate in a cohort for various reasons. Public resources allow us to share information and strategies beyond the cohort and potentially broaden the impact of the program.