On Campus Open Science Communities of Practice

This presentation establishes the conceptual and policy grounding for on-campus open science communities. It opens with the five key pillars of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and the LIBSENSE Statement on Open Science in Africa, which emphasises Africa-led and Africa-operated open infrastructure, community governance, multilingualism, and the co-creation of knowledge outputs with communities, including indigenous and traditional knowledge holders. Shared principles across both statements openness, accessibility, transparency, reproducibility, inclusivity and collaboration are then linked to concrete LIBSENSE actions across capacity building, research assessment reform, open research infrastructure and open science CoPs.

The remainder introduces communities of practice as social learning spaces, drawing on Lave and Wenger's situated learning theory, and defines Open Science Communities specifically as bottom-up, peer-based groups that discuss open science across disciplines and mediate between academics and policymakers. It sets out their structural and operational features, their central challenge moving from advocacy to actual behavioural change where open science is not yet normalised, and the critical success factors — chiefly institutional support through funding, embedding within an existing academic or library unit, and formal recognition of the champion's role. The session also defines the LIBSENSE ECR Champion role against LIBSENSE's three strategic pillars and six open science priorities, and closes with links to grassroots OSCs worldwide and open science resource centres.