Envisioning future scholarly communication: The Vienna Principles

In June 2016, we published the Vienna Principles: A Vision for Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century. The set of twelve principles describes the visions and foundations of a scholarly communication system that is based on the notion of openness in science, including the social sciences and humanities.

Open science demands the highest possible transparency, shareability and collaboration in knowledge production, as well as in the evaluation of scientific knowledge and impact. The principles are designed to offer a coherent frame of reference to the often controversial debates on how to improve the current system of scholarly communication.

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Our work started in Vienna during the spring of 2015, when the Open Access Network Austria (OANA) commissioned the working group “Open Access and Scholarly Communication” to sketch a vision of how open science can change scholarly communication in the long run. Over the year, we had five further meetings, each of them in a different Viennese location, hence the name “Vienna Principles”.

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We plan to hold group discussions and workshops with stakeholders, publisher and funders to explain how the principles could support the services they offer and articulate the capability of these principles to different stakeholders’ needs.

Furthermore, we are coordinating our efforts with other groups, such as the Force11 working group on the Scholarly Commons and SPARC Europe. By 2018, we aim to have an updated version of the Vienna Principles and several recommendations to support the adoption of open science based on the feedback obtained from the workshops and discussion groups.