Fostering cultural change in research through innovative knowledge sharing, evaluation, and community engagement strategies

Scientific research needs a system that better values rigorous, reusable contributions. Although open knowledge and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) principles, along with coalitions and infrastructures, are accelerating reform, evaluation still often defaults to standardized metrics such as the h-index and journal impact factor. This misalignment still incentivizes quantity over quality, undermining integrity and reproducibility, and making it harder for communities to learn from and build on existing work. In this perspective, we bring together a global community of researchers, funding institutions, industrial partners, and publishers from 14 different countries across the 5 continents to advance ongoing debates on open science and research evaluation. Our contribution to the research practice is to offer an integrative conceptual framework, an open knowledge system, that links knowledge production, validation, assessment, and reuse into a single ecosystem view, and to translate into practical recommendations across key stakeholder roles (researchers, institutions/evaluators, funders, and publishers). By shifting attention from papers and bibliometrics toward reusable knowledge contributions and their validation, the framework highlights concrete levers for cultural change (what to share, when/how to validate, how to support reuse, and what to reward) and offers a practical lens that stakeholders can use to diagnose misaligned incentives and to design reforms that make high-quality, cumulative contributions visible and valued.