I founded Strategies for Open Science (Stratos) in 2019 in a deliberate departure from my prior work. I had come to believe that the future of research communication needed to be rooted in rapid, open, and complete sharing of science; that we needed to actively and purposefully evolve the ecosystem.  Since then I have worked with and convened people who want to enact rational and radically open methods and tools that share the full body of work coming from the scholarly endeavor with all outputs made available as early as possible. 

As Stratos enters its seventh year, that conviction remains strong as ever. Now, the focus is on synthesis and convergence to bring the ideas and innovations together to maximize progress and impact. We need to break down remaining silos and monopolies. In working closely with partner organizations including funders, initiatives, consultations, and the scholarly publishing ecosystem, Stratos has set best practices, made strides in implementing them, and learned lessons that we can apply as we continue to work toward a new scholarly communications paradigm. Here are just a few of the milestone moments, learnings, and next steps we hope to carry forward into the new year.

Open Science is quality science

Recent Stratos projects have focused on leveraging the concepts behind Open Science to bring about greater research integrity, reproducibility, and speed. Open Science is really about good research. Verifiable, reproducible, transparent, efficient — the kind of research that moves knowledge forward in an equitable way. It’s about capturing the full scope of a scientific study and getting it out to readers, practitioners, and researchers as early as possible, so that they can implement and build on it more rapidly. Preliminary data from DataSeer and Clearskies shows that there may be a link between data/code sharing and integrity. If this is the case, we have a potential leading indicator of integrity and also an even more compelling case for open science. 

Today’s article is not the future

The existing traditional publishing process is slow, costly, and incomplete. It’s outdated, built around outdated print publishing norms and limitations. It doesn’t reflect current research workflows or modern researcher needs.

Half-measures won’t fix this problem. While requiring the sharing of data and other supporting outputs is a step in the right direction, the process today is still as fractured as publishing across multiple journal and publisher siloes. Preprinting is certainly faster and costs less than journal publishing, but preprints are not inherently more accurate or complete than articles. The system needs to evolve significantly to be able to truly reflect the research endeavor. 

We need to build something new from the ground up, based on real stakeholder needs and use cases, taking advantage of the significant technological advances and threats that AI brings, and assembling sustainable business models. . 

Stratos works on these problems with individual funders and institutions, while ICOR tackles it across the open science community. ICOR is a collective of research communications stakeholders who are rethinking scholarly communications in a holistic way with the aim of building a streamlined and fully open research ecosystem. This year, members of the community presented their vision for “research stacks” to the larger community at a webinar designed to gather feedback and build consensus around this new approach to scholarly communications. Recently, the technical community met and made significant advances in open standards that offer better ways to stack or contain research in its most complete sense. 

Momentum is building

Change can feel slow while it’s happening, but the contemporary landscape looks very different from 2019, when Stratos was ramping up. Today, Open Science is in the air. There are more policies and formal recommendations. The tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic was an unexpected boon for research transparency, spotlighting the need for rapidly communicating research particularly in those early, terrible times.

The August 2022 US OSTP “Nelson memo”  in parallel with related policy developments in the UK, Europe, and Latin America, had a reinforcing effect on the shift to widespread Open Science practices. That remains true, regardless of whether the Nelson Memo’s requirements are fully implemented across all agencies by the year-end deadline. Certainly early implementation by the National Institutes of Health, the world’s single largest biomedical funder, sent a clear message of change — even as it sent researchers and librarians scrambling to meet requirements.

The question now is: how do we do it all well? How do we maximize impact? What is the connection between openness and our underlying goals for the future of research? How do we engineer a system that fosters greater integrity, public trust, reproducibility, and equity?

Progress flourishes through partnership and convergence

One thing is for sure: we can’t do it alone. Collaborative action across the pillars of the research establishment — including institutions, associations, funders, service providers — will be vital to developing the infrastructure and incentive systems that will ultimately lead to meaningful and lasting change. Stratos specializes in working with stakeholders across the scholarly communications ecosystem to develop practical solutions that foster research excellence through speed, transparency, integrity, and rigor.

At Stratos,we have a great deal of flexibility in how we approach our work. The day-to-day business of Stratos ranges from requests for proposals, to product and policy development; change management to thought partnership and strategic advice. This fractured landscape of 2019 allowed me to focus Stratos’ early work on some unique and interesting implementations of Open Science. 

Among the earliest was Aligning Science Across Parkinson‘s (ASAP), a funder dedicated to breaking down the barriers that impede progress. The ASAP team saw the potential for accelerating lifesaving research inherent in Open Science’s more rapid, transparent, and collaborative model, but needed support to develop necessary systems and infrastructure. Together, we built a system of policies, practices, technologies, and partners from the ground up that enabled the organization to transition to a fully open publishing model. That early success became an ICOR case study — a concrete and measurable example of what works and what doesn’t in Open Science implementation.

In the years since, Stratos has been fortunate to work with a number of leading organizations and initiatives that understand these lessons well. Organizations with similar values, who place a premium on practical solutions, meaningful progress, and data-driven innovation. 

Thanks to our friends…and here’s to 2026

Along the way, I’ve worked with many talented and dedicated friends and colleagues to help make these projects a success: fellow consultant Jennifer Kemp; our expert support team Sarah Greene, Nicole Martinelli, and Ash Shairzay; Stratos’s brilliant advisors, Leslie Chan, Jean-Claude Guedon, and Heather Joseph; countless collaborators and clients, who share their needs and place their trust in us. I am so grateful for all of your expertise, ingenuity, and support in this work. Thank you!

As for what the coming year holds — it’s difficult to say. Predictions are a fun parlor game but they don’t address current needs. Planning for the future does. I feel very confident saying that Open Science will continue to advance in 2026, and in the years that follow.  Stratos will remain focused on making that path shorter, smoother, and saner, together with our partners.