Monitoring Open Science policy using a regional CRIS – the Flanders case with FRIS

In Flanders the government adopted an ambitious policy initiative to promote Open Science and it appointed FRIS, the regional CRIS, as the main tool to monitor the progress.

Using a CRIS as a monitoring tool for a regional policy initiative has some advantages like good transparency, consistency, comparability of the results and less administrative burden for the institutions once the process for gathering and sending the information is in place.

The preparatory process to define concepts, create definitions, discuss about the scope and the goals, was quite laborious and time-consuming, but proved very useful and necessary to get a good common understanding of the context, yielding better metrics and better alignment of the stakeholders towards the same goals.

The current metrics framework is not an endpoint, but only the beginning. It is a start to improve the way we will monitor Open Science as we gather more insights on the way. The metrics help to get all stakeholders pulling in the same direction towards more Open Science.