Call for Participation

New Definitions for Open Science

Over the past decade, Open Science emerged as a pervasive and defining element of higher education and scholarly research across the Netherlands and globe. The term is centered in institutional strategies, funding programs, work processes, and approaches to outreach. But what, in fact, is the meaning and definition of Open Science?

OSCU Publishing, a new initiative from the Open Science Community Utrecht, calls for reflections, statements, manifestos, provocations, creative engagements, and rejoinders on the question of defining Open Science to be collected as chapters for our inaugural book publication on New Definitions for Open Science. We seek to bring these writings together in order to develop a prismatic perspective from the community in and around Utrecht.

Knowledge organisations evoke the term Open Science on such a regular basis that it deserves further inspection. What conditions define the parameters of this phrase? What is at stake in its deployment? Who is this for? And why? How has Open Science changed, grown, degraded, or flourished? Where should Open Science take knowledge organisations in the future?

Open Science is emblematic of Utrecht, whose reputation among knowledge organisations across the world is inextricably linked to this term. And so it is long overdue that we, as the community that constitutes this place, build our definition together.

The underlying ambition is to display heterogeneity, prismatic perspectives, and difference as a cornerstone of Open Science. The chapters within the book will, we hope, present a wide array of ideas and thereby an overarching argument that we move toward the knowledge culture we seek by opening up understandings of Open Science, providing new energy and capacity for culture change.

We seek short-form and article-length pieces of writing. Pieces can be creative, traditional, or transgressive. Please send expressions of interest to pub[at]oscu.nl before 1 December 2026.

OSCU Publishing is a new initiative to enact cooperative, community-led open publishing in the Netherlands. Over the past year, we built our own publishing platform that works through a robust array of open infrastructures for scholarly communication. Now deployed, the platform enables enhanced forms of citation, sharing, formatting, and reading for scholarship.

In addition to the technical possibilities, this new platform enables more democratic and participatory forms of governance within scholarly publishing. By rendering the labour of publishing more accessible, the platform will provide the space and means to form small-scale communities that can thoroughly realise community-led projects and seek out a more inclusive future for publishing.