At the end of 2023, the Chief Science Advisor of Canada assembled a committee of experts to advise her on the development of a scientific data governance framework as part of a coherent open science approach for Canada.
In February 2020, the Office of the Chief Science Advisor (OCSA) released the Roadmap for Open Science. The Roadmap has contributed to stimulating and coordinating the federal science community’s progress towards open science, with results that include the development of departmental action plans, guidance on implementing open-by-default, and creating a federal open science repository.
The Roadmap (in Recommendation 9) also led to considerations of open science for federally funded, extramural research, especially matters pertaining to open access publications, article processing charges, supports to researchers, and transformative agreements with publishers. These topics were considered in round tables completed in December 2021 and published in the 2022 report, “The Open Science Dialogues: Summary of Stakeholders’ Round Tables”.
As intended in the Roadmap, after attention was put on advancing open access publishing, attention is now moving to data, with a special focus on the implementation of FAIR principles to maximize the benefits of openness (Recommendation 5).
Canada’s progress on developing a coherent national approach to scientific data urgently needs exploration. A fully functioning scientific data ecosystem is a requirement for Canadian researchers to attract and maintain global collaborations and international research funding, for example, Horizon Europe projects. Canada risks falling behind in open science implementation and being less competitive as a result.