How Paperstars Aligns with UNESCO’s Open Science Recommendations
When UNESCO released its Recommendation on Open Science—a landmark global framework that encourages scientific systems to become more inclusive, transparent, and collaborative.
It wasn’t just a declaration. It was a call to action.
At Paperstars, we’ve taken that call seriously. As we build this platform, we’re working to align with the core principles UNESCO laid out. Here's how we're doing that—one star at a time.
📖 What Is the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science?
UNESCO’s Open Science Recommendation outlines a vision for making science more:
- Accessible to all
- Inclusive across disciplines, countries, and career stages
- Transparent in methods, review, and data
- Collaborative, with shared ownership of knowledge
- Equitable
It encourages open access, data sharing, citizen science, responsible metrics, and participatory evaluation of research.
🧩 How Paperstars Supports These Values
⭐ 1. UNESCO Value: Quality & Integrity
“ensuring that science is high-quality and scrutinized by bringing together different sources of knowledge and making evaluation of scientific methods and outputs more transparent and accurate.”
Our Answer: Open Evaluation & Responsible Metrics
UNESCO calls for the development of responsible, qualitative evaluation systems that go beyond traditional metrics like journal impact factor or H-index.
What Paperstars does:
- Allows researchers to rate published papers based on actual quality, not prestige
- Provides structured review prompts to support thoughtful, transparent commentary
- Moves away from citation-based metrics and toward quality-based ratings
📖 2. UNESCO Value: Collective Benefit
recognizing that science is a global public good that belongs to all of humanity.
Our Answer: Incentivising Open Science Practices
UNESCO promotes open access to publications, data, and code as essential to reproducibility and global knowledge-sharing.
What Paperstars does:
- Automatically awards a 1-star badge to papers with publicly available datasets
- Highlights openness as a core marker of paper quality, not an afterthought
- Plans to support integrations with repositories (e.g., OSF, Zenodo) to verify data availability
🌐 3. UNESCO Value: Equity and Fairness
ensuring equitable, fair and reciprocal access to science for all producers and consumers of knowledge regardless of their location, nationality, race, age, gender, income, socio-economic circumstance, career stage, discipline, language, religion, disability, ethnicity, migratory status or any other grounds.
Our Answer: Lowering Barriers, Building Equity
Paperstars is designed to level the playing field—for those just entering academia, those outside elite institutions, and those whose work may otherwise go unseen.
What Paperstars does:
- Provides free access globally, with no paywalls or publishing fees
- Ensures anonymity in reviews, reducing status-driven bias and power imbalance
- Welcomes input from all career stages, not just senior academics or already-published researchers
- Avoids prestige-based rankings that disproportionately favour the Global North
🧪 4. UNESCO Value: Diversity & Inclusiveness
embracing diversity of knowledge, practices, workflows, languages and research topics and outputs.
Our Answer: Equity, Inclusion, and Global Participation
UNESCO’s recommendation emphasises the need to reduce geographic, economic, and institutional barriers to participation in science.
What Paperstars does:
- Makes the platform free to use, globally
- Recognises and celebrates contributions from researchers in all disciplines and roles
- Encourages diverse perspectives through structured but open-ended review prompts
👉 Find out more about the UNESCO Recommendation for Open Science
💬 Why This Matters
UNESCO’s Open Science principles aren’t just a helpful framework—they closely reflect the values we hold as the people building Paperstars.
We believe:
- Research should be evaluated on quality, not prestige
- Openness and transparency should be rewarded, not optional
- Diverse voices—from all career stages and global regions—deserve to be heard
- Science should be a public good, not a gated competition
This platform isn’t a product of cynical metrics or publishing politics. It’s being built by researchers who care deeply about making science more fair, more thoughtful, and more human.
We’re aligning with UNESCO’s vision because we believe in it—not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s necessary.
If this resonates with you too, we’d love to have you on board.
🚀 Want to Support the Shift?
If you care about transparency, open access, and building systems that work for everyone—join us.
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Let’s rethink research evaluation—together.
