Designing a Metascience Institute

Abstract

This proposal outlines an open, transparent and collaborative process to design a Metascience Institute that would apply the scientific method onto itself, with the mission to improve the research landscape systemically in terms of maximizing societal benefit and public documentation thereof. This facility is envisaged to engage in the systematic study of the research ecosystem, initially at a national level in Germany but later on also in other contexts. As such, the Metascience Institute would assess systemic properties, interactions of different components within and beyond the research system and how the roles played by various components are aligned with goals of relevant stakeholder groups and broader societal benefits. Collaborating with any interested stakeholders on an initially narrow yet steadily expanding range of intra- and transdisciplinary use cases and using an appropriate mix of experimental, theoretical, empirical and computational approaches, the Metascience Institute would assess existing and proposed policies and practices in the research ecosystem and engage in public discourse around them, including by assessing the relative costs, benefits and side effects of alternative parametrizations of the system. The project proposed here is to design the organizational structure of such a Metascience Institute in an evidence-based and community-led fashion, to seed it with organizational values, to establish it as an independent legal entity with open and transparent policies and practices, to provide it with an initial technical infrastructure online, to design evidence-based and sustainable mechanisms by which it prioritizes its activities, and to document the entire process in a way that would facilitate reuse and adaptation by other communities or entities aiming at evidence-based systemic improvements to the research ecosystem or selected niches within it.