"Work in progress" report of a tailored open scholarship mapping strategy at SFU

Abstract (English)

At the Simon Fraser University, we are one year into our cultural change shift towards open scholarship as default. To inform the decisions we need to make to support our community, we have been working on mapping our needs, desires and gaps, while avoiding to summarise everything into simple and unsustainable metrics or indicators. Instead of counting how many open access papers we have been publishing, and diagnosing how well we are doing on open scholarship practices based on this number, we believe that we need more complex information than that to fully understand our community and design effective support strategies.
Therefore, we have been working on a tailored open scholarship mapping strategy to meet the needs of both individual researchers and university leadership, which includes a survey derived from the Road2Openness tool, interviews, and focus groups. In parallel, we have also collected data from the OpenAlex and ORCID databases to combine with our qualitative data. In this presentation, we will share our strategy, decision-making process, and discuss how we can use this information to guide our next steps in supporting our community in their open scholarship practices. In particular, we will discuss how and why we modified the Road2Openness tool to better fit our context, if and how available databases can be leveraged, how we transformed this exercise into a community engagement opportunity, and how we are combining our qualitative and quantitative data to inform our decisions. In the end, we will also share our reflections on the process and the challenges we have faced, and how we are addressing them, as well as next steps in our strategy.