The PREreview Team is very excited to welcome Arturo Garduño-Magaña as the Open Grant Reviewers Program Manager and Trainer.
In this new role, Arturo will work in close collaboration with Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) and Health Research Alliance (HRA) to develop and pilot Open & Equitable Model Funding Program, a new model of grantmaking to make both the process of grantmaking and the resulting research outputs more transparent, equitable, and inclusive.
Over the course of the next two years, the Program is set to design a range of interventions for funders to apply to their grantmaking cycle, including how funding schemes are developed, socialized, reviewed, overseen, supported, and evaluated.
Our role at PREreview will primarely focus on formalizing the interventions related to the grant review process, including but not limited to the recruitment, training, and retention of the grant reviewing pool. We are also going to develop portable materials and resources to train socially-conscious grant reviewers and program staff, and organize and facilitate training for pilot cohorts of grant reviewers across funding agencies involved in the pilot.
Our team will work in close collaboration with Eunice Mercado-Lara, ORFG Open & Equitable Civic Science Fellow, who says about this work,
One of the critical aspects of the Program is identifying areas of opportunity within the cohort members’ existing grantmaking processes and crafting tailored solutions for each of them. PREreview’s experience working with various and diverse actors in the academic community, combined with Arturo’s expertise in the open space and grants management, will be a distinctive asset for the Program.
Arturo joins our team with a wide range of experience in the space of open science advocacy and community of practice. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Library and Information Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and is currently finishing his master’s degree in the same discipline at the Library Science and Information Research Institute, UNAM.
Over the past few years, Arturo acted as Deputy Director of Open Science Repositories at the National Council for Science and Technology of Mexico, where he managed a portfolio of 108 projects to raise open science capacities in over a hundred universities and research institutions, building a community of researchers, specialists, and developers engaged to foster open practices.
Arturo has been active in the SPARC’s OpenCon community, and deeply understands the importance of framing openness around equity, diversity and inclusion practices.
During my time as a public university student, I understood the important role that openness plays in reducing the difficulties to access knowledge and to set the floor even for everyone interested to learn and share. My work in the Council and with the Open Science community let me identify and recognize some of the most common biases and inequities existing during the research funding and assessment processes, but also mechanisms to reduce them. I’m excited to join this dream team to work together and help to achieve the goals of the Program.
Daniela Saderi, PREreview Director, says,
It is an honor for us to play a part in the development of the Open & Equitable Model Funding Program, working together with an outstanding team of professionals who are motivated to enable real change in the way research is evaluated through an equity lens. I am confident that Arturo will successfully lead this work through its objectives and move beyond everyone's expectations.
