Our extensive partnerships to accelerate change towards open, trustworthy and inclusive research communications, alongside the enthusiasm of early-career researchers to embrace and promote such practices, led to the decision to launch the Open Science Champions network. eLife now welcomes 150 Open Science Champions into this pilot initiative.
The network is a response to the appetite among researchers to learn the latest best practices for making science accessible and equitable. The Champions will have access to select training resources developed alongside the eLife Ambassadors, our other projects such as Sciety, and our partner organisations involved in the Ambassadors training programme: Reproducibility for Everyone (R4E), Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE), PREreview, Kindness in Science, GreenLabs-NL and the Sustainable Research Symposium, Future of Research, and Researcher Mental Health Observatory (ReMO), to name a few. While being a Community Ambassador requires a high level of commitment and frequent interactions with this remote community, our Champions have an opportunity to learn about practices eLife endorses at their own pace. They will be kept abreast of our developments across all eLife community programmes via a monthly mailing list, and we will seek to learn from them about how they are using the resources provided in their work and in their scientific circles.
Just as we opened the eLife Community Ambassadors programme upon the community’s demand to convene and facilitate a worldwide community of like-minded researchers to advocate for responsible behaviours in science, we are piloting the Open Science Champions network to enable more researchers to engage and be part of the transition to open science and improving research culture.