So yeah, I'm very happy to be here and to share a bit of our perspective as early career researchers on how we view open science and research assessment. And before I go into more details of this, I will take a few minutes to just introduce your doc, the European Council of doctoral candidates and junior researchers.

So what we are is a pan-European umbrella organization of currently 26 national associations. All of these national associations are representing doctoral candidates and junior researchers, so essentially all early career researchers. And as the ROOF organization, we're representing them in the European policy and with all sorts of activities in

the European sphere. We also this year have quite the nice jubilee that we are celebrating our 20th anniversary already.

And as I will show in the next slide just briefly, there's a lot of things that happened in the past years and also are reaching in the future where we already were quite successful with many activities also regarding open science, as well as many other topics that are important for early career researchers.

So these are just some of the current activities. In the right hand side, you see a screenshot of our open science ambassador program that was launched in 2019 and was a very successful program. Currently, this is paused because of so many other institutions and organizations that have

put up trainings that have put up their own ambassador programs and so forth. So we're currently revising this with the idea to bring something up that has an added value and is not just repeating things that are now also available at other levels. We're hosting events. For example, just a few days ago, we had a very nice webinar discussion

with different stakeholders from university organizations to publishers that was concerning open peer review and current developments thereof. We're collaborating as an expert partner in the Open Research Europe project. Eurodoc is also a partner in

the Optima project, so is contributing to development of open science and practices in the Ukrainian research area. So we're active in all these kinds of ways. And also, since we've heard so much about open science and research assessment, we're also contributing through one European funded project, the Open Universal Science project, which has just started.

It's collecting more and more of the best practices, more than have been in recent comprehensive studies shown. And in this project, we are also then testing in pilots at different research performing organization and different research funding organizations across Europe.

These best practices to give the best possible policy impact out of the consortium. So there's all sorts of activities where Eurodoc is very active in the European sphere. And, of course, also this includes policy input of ourselves, like a response for the implementation of plan S. This concerns

also some some overviews and surveys that we have done, like for example, the publication on the bottom left that you see, where we work with with our peers to see how open science is done, what an impact it has on early career researchers. So this

is this is available. And of course, we're also involved with the drafting of the scoping report that led to this whole process towards the coalition that we heard already a couple of times during this this event. So there's all sorts of activities where Eurodoc is involved and where Eurodoc helps to advance the European research area and to also help advance open science in general.

Now, without needing to repeat all the good things that we already heard throughout the day about open science about the benefits that it brings and about the also the relations. Let me start with a different way of perspective so often if you are engaged with different scientists

and also there's some some critics that see some of the current developments in a way maybe critically. And some things that you may hear is that open science is such a newfangled idea is something new that's not so much needed, which actually is not quite true.

So let's look back as one example just of some 80 years where already Robert Merton, for example, just as one example of a scientist who already defined exactly the same values, saying that communalism, saying that scientists should have common ownership in order to promote

collective collaboration and that exactly secrecy is the opposite of the norm of good science. So, being open isn't really that the very new idea of course. You could of course go on with such critics, and then they might tell you well but open access that's fine okay and we'll see

how to manage this but what about other ideas with all these open science business so what's about open data for example is this really needed. Well, as we see in this example, this is actually a discussion of a problem that's going on for more than three centuries in this one example, so Isaac Newton was becoming very adamant in his

letters to astronomer john flamesteed because flamesteed was providing him with calculations, but didn't provide the data along with it. And so, Isaac Newton told him literally your observations are needed, just your calculations without the data beyond that are

meaningless. So it's something that's actually there that's been lingering in science and in the discussions for quite a while. And also it's not quite just the ivory tower principle. So it's not just that this is something for for pure fundamental scientists for very broad comparison if you look into, for example,

patent law patents is something that more and more scientists are being involved with in order to make that the science count in order to also receive the the corresponding impact and really get more work out of the results that you're creating and so something that's very much fostered by all the funding agencies.

And if we take a closer look, so this kind of formal structured system is something that dates back to the 15th century. And it's actually something that from the very beginning required the disclosure of the details of inventions, it's been at that time

a degree in the Indonesian state. And that's something that actually the business people from Venice have spread throughout the world, and something that has taken so much on because there is an inherent value in this kind of sharing. Of course, in this case, also for the companies to get at least for limited time some protection for these kind of inventions, these kinds of developments that they're undergoing.

But the openness is a key feature and that's something that also then provides a value that's worthwhile for the countries to to actually put all this into into place. So, in a way, patents can really be seen as a way as a means to to open up knowledge in exchange for this kind of protection.

So in spite of debates that also have been going on in the 17th, 18th century and so forth, if this is not just hindering it, if knowledge transfer would need to be more open, it's actually something that helped with more knowledge transfer than the practices have been before. And that's also something that different organizations are very much agreeing with. So we see some very recent statements from

this year. One is from the European Commission and one is from all European academies that both of them agree. Fundamentally, there's no position between some valorization of the results, protecting the intellectual property rights,

but making all the contents openly available and also adhering to all principles of open science. And so, in this, there's many things that have been going on for centuries actually in the developments. But of course, the terminology and the momentum that we see today, that's something very recent. So,

open science as a term has been coined only some 40 years ago, not quite 40 years ago. And since this coining of the term, there's been so much attention to this, so much development to get all the different features, all the different aspects, what's included there, what can be done to improve science, to get to better science, to better science practices,

and to more exchange and a better working system overall. And so we see as one example on the top, one, a distinguishment of very small details, what kind of ways of open science are there, and this has since the Foster Project even been developed further.

And one of the recent examples on the right hand side that even one of the largest European research organizations has taken over a comprehensive strategy as a comprehensive policy to make this the very core of their activities.

Now, for early career researchers, there's certainly some value in this, as can be seen by so many early career researchers actively driving the whole development of open science. But there's different sides to take into account there. So, on the one hand side, we

know from quite a couple of publications and quite a couple of studies that open science also does provide career benefits, particularly for early career researchers, but generally more in the long run. So we see evidence of an increased number of citations, although there's a little bit of discussion in the

ongoing publication, so this is research on research that's still being performed and that's still being discussed in the communities. But generally, it's been observed that there's a greater recognition of what researchers have done, this open science is creating additional project opportunities and is providing thus in the long term career benefits.

The only problem is providing exemplary on the right hand side. So the right hand side is a recent report of the Swiss National Science Foundation, but it's quite comparable to what's been going on in many countries in many academic systems worldwide.

We see that the average contract length for early career researchers is getting shorter and shorter, that there's more and more precarity to particularly early career researchers. And early career researchers in this case, if we adhere to this one study, for example, postdocs are referred to 10, 15 years even after completing the doctorate.

So it's a very long time in their career path that they still have no planning security, that they don't know what tomorrow will bring for them. These kind of uncertainties and imponderabilities, these, of course, provide obstacles and these, of course, require many of

the early career researchers to really focus just on short term rewards that just frankly said continues their careers. And so with these shortening cycles of assessment and deployment, these kind of short term rewards, that's something that's actually been in the

way of open science, of adapting open science practices, or even just getting into these kind of practices and obtaining these kind of competences because it's time that could otherwise be spent to try and just keep your employment.

So with these kind of systems, there's, of course, a lot of obstacles, particularly for early career researchers, and that's something that will need to be addressed, particularly through metrics and criteria that focus more on other factors that are conducive to all these other things that early career researchers, just as other researchers also, are already doing.

And so in order to increase this low uptake beyond what enthusiasts are already doing, we'll need to overcome these kind of systemic obstacles. And that's, of course, something, again, as mentioned before, that this agreement on events and research assessment and

the corresponding coalition are really setting out to do, and something where we have so much momentum already that there's high hopes that at least parts of these obstacles and of these detrimental effects within the systems can be overcome, can be improved. And this will really foster much, much more the adaption of open science

and the possibilities to utilize all these benefits that we have heard already. And so, yeah, with the conclusions, despite the long, long practice, there's so many benefits across sectors, benefits also for researchers' careers. And so without these obstacles, with an improved rewards and incentive systems, with the advancement of research assessment,

but just as well with the training of the state-of-the-art practices, we can overcome this. And simply in one short and very specific sentence, we can get to a point where open science is really recognized as just being good science, as our late colleague Don Cannon always used to tell.

And with this, I thank you for your attention.