Image: Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash. 

The questions GenR wants to ask in the context of COVID-19 are what challenges are driving innovation in the Open Science community involved in delivering and developing technical systems.

Open Science has been pushing forward on many fronts with systems, tools, and workflows for greater reproducibility, dissemination, and societal impact of new knowledge. 

The recent EUvsVirus hackathon highlighted the wide array of impacts of COVID-19 outside of the core challenge of combating the disease — making it clear that many more areas of research are impacted. As examples these include: business continuity and protecting employees; social & political cohesion and mitigating fake news spreading or supporting the cultural sector; remote working & education such as reorganising family life during remote working & education, or; in digital finance and speeding-up access to financial support and the list goes on.

New demands, increased public scrutiny of science, and an accelerated change are some of the immediate effects of COVID-19 on Open Science systems. 

In this theme we will look at examples where innovation has become actionable in system provision, in such as examples as: the reproducibility spectrum, OER and online learning, Open Science skilling, collaborative working on research, global access to knowledge, lowering access barriers, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), open peer review, computational publishing, modelling, or new open metrics and evaluation.