The story behind OPENRAM: From an idea to a global research collaboration

By Zehra Taşkın, OPENRAM Project Coordinator, Hacettepe University

Every research project begins somewhere. Sometimes with a question, sometimes with a conversation, and sometimes with an unexpected connection between people who have never met. For OPENRAM, it was a combination of all three.

I had spent many years researching scholarly communication, scholarly publishing, and research assessment, particularly the limitations of conventional evaluation systems and the inequalities they can reproduce. I had even explored some of these questions in an earlier, unsuccessful ERC proposal, driven by the ambition to develop more comprehensive, nuanced, and equitable approaches to evaluating research.

The scientific questions were already there. So was my conviction that meaningful change in research assessment required bringing together different forms of expertise, research traditions, and institutional perspectives. This was never going to be something that one researcher, or even one institution, could accomplish alone. What was missing was the right opportunity to build an international collaboration around these questions.

And that opportunity emerged through an unexpected academic connection.

At the time, Ismael Ràfols and I did not know each other. The person who brought us together was Emanuel Kulczycki, my former postdoctoral supervisor. During a conversation with Ismael about research assessment and potential collaboration, Emanuel mentioned my work. That conversation eventually led to Ismael reaching out to me with a proposal to develop a joint international research project. It is remarkable how much can begin with a conversation between two colleagues.

Ismael’s suggestion provided the initial opportunity to bring together a wider network of researchers around a shared ambition. From there, I began working on transforming that opportunity into a structured research programme, developing the proposal and bringing together the institutions and researchers who would eventually form the OPENRAM consortium. What followed involved countless discussions, revisions, decisions, and efforts to connect different perspectives into a coherent research agenda.

Looking back, I find something particularly meaningful about the way OPENRAM began. A project dedicated to opening research assessment to multiple contexts emerged through the very processes of academic connection, knowledge exchange, and international collaboration that we hope to strengthen through our research.

And that was only the beginning.

Building a Consortium, Building a Shared Vision

One of the most rewarding aspects of developing OPENRAM was bringing together researchers and institutions with different experiences, perspectives, and expertise. Our ambition required a genuinely international and interdisciplinary collaboration. We needed colleagues working on scientometrics and research information infrastructures, but also researchers examining the social, political, institutional, and geographical dimensions of research evaluation. We wanted to connect expertise in open science, scholarly communication, research policy, and participatory methods. Most importantly, we wanted perspectives from different research contexts to be part of the project’s intellectual foundations.

Gradually, OPENRAM became a collaboration connecting institutions and researchers across Europe, Latin America, and South Africa. Building such a consortium involves much more than assembling a list of partners. It requires developing a common language, identifying complementary strengths, understanding different institutional realities, and finding a shared direction without losing the diversity that makes the collaboration valuable. We had many discussions about what OPENRAM should achieve and how we could turn our ideas into a coherent research programme. And then came our first application.

The First Attempt: 80 Points, but No Funding

Our first proposal received 80 points in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Staff Exchanges evaluation. It was encouraging to see that the proposal had merit. At the same time, it was disappointing to learn that the score was not sufficient to secure funding.

Anyone who has coordinated an international research proposal knows how much collective effort goes into an application. Beyond the scientific writing, there are months of coordination, meetings, administrative arrangements, budget discussions, and institutional commitments. An unsuccessful evaluation is therefore never simply a number. But we had something important: a consortium that believed in the idea and a research question that remained just as relevant. We decided to try again.

The Second Attempt: A Stronger OPENRAM

The second application gave us an opportunity to revisit the entire proposal. We reconsidered how our research objectives connected, how the different strands of work complemented one another, and how our international exchanges could contribute to concrete scientific and methodological developments. We worked to make the relationship between OPENRAM’s conceptual foundations, empirical investigations, technical development, and participatory activities more coherent.

The Multiversatory, our central innovation, became an even clearer organising concept for the programme. The process also strengthened our collaboration. Preparing a proposal together is itself a form of learning. Different perspectives challenge assumptions, identify blind spots, and create opportunities to rethink ideas. When the second evaluation results arrived, OPENRAM had received 97 points. This time, we had succeeded.

Of course, receiving the funding decision was a wonderful moment. But what made it especially meaningful was knowing how much collective effort, persistence, and intellectual commitment had brought us there. And perhaps that is one of the first lessons of OPENRAM: meaningful collaboration develops through dialogue, revision, and the willingness to learn from one another.

So, What Do We Want to Change?

OPENRAM stands for Opening Research Assessment to Multi-Contexts.

The project is funded by the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Staff Exchanges programme and coordinated by Hacettepe University. Over four years, our international consortium will investigate how research assessment can become more inclusive, transparent, participatory, and responsive to different contexts.

At the centre of this ambition is the Multiversatory, which we envision as an open research information infrastructure, a methodological framework, and a participatory living lab. We want to bring together diverse research information sources and develop approaches that allow scientific contributions to be understood from multiple perspectives. We will explore three interconnected areas.

Contextualised evaluation asks how assessment approaches can respond to different institutional missions, disciplinary characteristics, research profiles, and geographical conditions.

Epistemic equity examines how research information systems and evaluation practices shape the visibility and recognition of different forms of knowledge, particularly those emerging from underrepresented communities and regions.

Equitable collaborations investigates how international research partnerships can be understood and assessed in ways that recognise reciprocity, shared contributions, and differences in access to resources and decision-making.

Through case studies, technical implementations, and participatory actions, we will investigate real-world evaluation challenges and use what we learn to inform the development of the Multiversatory.

We also want our work to be useful beyond the consortium. This means sharing research outputs openly, developing practical guidance, engaging with institutions and policymakers, and creating opportunities for learning and discussion.

Opening Research Assessment to Multiple Contexts

There is something particularly important to me about the word opening in OPENRAM. Opening means making room for perspectives that have received too little attention. It means recognising the diversity of scientific contributions and the contexts in which they emerge. It also means being willing to question established evaluation practices and to develop alternatives collectively.

I believe responsible research assessment requires both methodological rigour and sensitivity to context. It requires reliable evidence, transparent criteria, and an understanding of how evaluation systems influence research practices and opportunities. This is an ambitious undertaking, and we certainly do not have all the answers. That is precisely why OPENRAM is structured around international exchange, collective experimentation, and participatory learning. Our consortium brings together people who may approach research assessment from different traditions, methodologies, and geographical perspectives. I see this diversity as one of our greatest strengths.

The Journey Has Just Begun

OPENRAM officially started on 1 June 2026, and we held our kick-off meeting on 19 June. After the long process of developing, revising, and resubmitting our proposal, we are now entering a new phase: turning our shared ideas into research, tools, collaborations, and practical contributions.

There will be challenges. Coordinating an international consortium across institutions, countries, administrative systems, and time zones is already teaching us that. But there is also a great deal to look forward to: research exchanges, new collaborations, comparative investigations, workshops, discussions, and the gradual development of the Multiversatory.

This blog will be one of the spaces where we share that journey. We hope it will bring together research insights, experiences from our exchanges, methodological reflections, and different voices from across the OPENRAM community. We began with a question about how research could be assessed more fairly. We built a consortium around that question. We submitted, learned, revised, and tried again. Now we have four years to explore what we can achieve together.

Welcome to OPENRAM.