Fostering Innovation Through Open Science Workshop Summary

About ORCA  

The Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA) is a non-profit focused on making science more engaging, accessible, and actionable. ORCA prides itself on being a “doing shop” rather than a “talking shop,” with an emphasis on tangible outcomes and meaningful impact. We have a unique ability to build inclusive, big-tent coalitions that transcend boundaries—whether geographic, disciplinary, sectoral, or career-stage, creating spaces where diverse voices converge to drive innovation and action.

We are proud to partner with a diverse range of organizations to advance our mission, including NSF, NASA, UNESCO, CERN, Science Europe, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Schmidt Sciences, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the University of California’s Haas School of Business, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, the Academic Data Science Alliance, and the Belmont Forum. More on ORCA programs and activities may
be found here.

About this report

This record documents the January 13–14, 2026 convening in New York City organized by the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA), in collaboration with Microsoft, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and CERN.

Building on ORCA’s Fostering Innovation through Open Science: A Cross-Sector Roadmap for Impact, the workshop brought together leaders from academia, industry, philanthropy, and civil society to identify practical, cross-sector opportunities to advance open science, open source, and open data as drivers of innovation and public value. Participants emphasized that openness is increasingly motivated by concrete scientific, economic, and technological needs, including AI development, yet continues to face structural barriers such as misaligned research incentives, extractive data dynamics, and underinvestment in shared infrastructure maintenance.

Recognizing that no single sector can address these challenges alone, the group committed to launching a cross-sector demonstration pilot under the Fostering Innovation Network (FIN), coordinated by ORCA, Microsoft, and CERN, to test how coalition-based approaches can treat openness as core innovation infrastructure and advance resilient, scalable open science practices.