The future of open research is uncertain. On the one hand, decades of activism and institutional support have placed the value and significance of intelligent strategies and formats for open research (and its dissemination) beyond doubt. Openness is central to the development of trustworthy, accountable, collaborative, and socially engaged knowledge. On the other hand, open research measures need to be tailored to diverse research conditions around the globe and across domains, which in turn requires substantial investment, local engagement, responsiveness to the ethical and social dimensions of inquiry, and attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

While the implementation of open science principles is certainly facilitated by ever more accessible digital technologies and training programmes, for many researchers around the world, acquiring the expertise and skills to engage in open research practices remains elusive. Exposure to open research initiatives often happens as an end-user rather than as an active contributor. This is because well-resourced environments produce the tools, set the research goals, define the standards and methods, which leads to them benefiting disproportionally from the opportunities. This makes even the best-intentioned projects into opportunities for the best-resourced environments (which are often in charge of producing open science tools) to impose their own understanding of research goals, standards, and methods on everybody else. Therefore, without domain- and location-specific input, the risk is that open research amplifies existing inequities and discrimination in the production, use, and evaluation of knowledge, thereby inflicting damage to the research system instead of the promised improvements. And this is not to mention the ongoing debates over how politically unpalatable open science may be, the extent to which open research has been appropriated by commercial entities such as large publishing companies and digital platforms, the fraught intersection between open science and artificial intelligence, and the ongoing difficulties in supporting and maintaining open research activities and tools in the long term.

This conference brings together scholars, activists, and policymakers to consider this challenging landscape and discuss the future of open research. Our goal is to facilitate the development of open research practices explicitly geared to serve the public interest, which involves interrogating what may constitute that ‘public interest’ to different audiences and in different locations around the world. A central element for our discussions will be the development of a Munich Manifesto for Equitable Open Research, detailing ways to utilise open research to foster reliable, responsible, and equitable forms of inquiry. A draft text of the manifesto will be circulated two weeks before the conference to all participants, and one session of the conference will be dedicated to discussing and finalising the declaration and its possible signatories.

We call for contributions by researchers across all fields of knowledge, including the arts and humanities, policy-makers interested in research and development, representatives of scholarly and commercial institutions involved in research, and civil society associations engaged in knowledge production. Themes may include, but not be limited to:

• Contributions from the arts and humanities to represent open research in alternative formats
• Historical, philosophical, and social studies of open research and its implementation
• Ethics and research integrity in the context of open research
• Bibliometric and other data-intensive investigations of open research
• The use of AI in support of socially responsive and responsible forms of open research
• Legal perspectives on open research implementations across different settings
• Training and capacity building for responsive and responsible open research
• Infrastructures and tools supporting responsive and responsible open research
• Policy-making initiatives and recommendations for equitable open research