The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have, we believe, found their moment – they have never been more relevant. In a world of uncertainty and economic distress, we have reached a singular moment where we can make a distinct choice – follow the same path as before, or focus on a world in which we take Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ to heart and reformulate economic drivers around a more holistic vision for humanity. Universities and the research sector should be looking at a bigger picture – one around alignment with Sustainable Development Goals. Providing impact through research, but also through continuous education and retraining in a fluid job market.

Digital Science has invested in providing a lens in Dimensions through which research can be viewed by Sustainable Development Goals. Understanding the goals; how much current research interest relates to them; how collaborative they are; and how they relate to traditional re- search fields is a key part of what research managers, policymakers and strategists should be engaging within the next few years.

Technology infrastructure is critical in order to support the culture change that is taking place in research. This cultural shift will take decades and Digital Science aims to provide the tools which will help drive and inspire technological innovation and developments that will be adopted in the coming years.

We believe in the emergence of a new, interlinked, globalised research infrastructure that supports everything from the exchange of research ideas and collaboration to research communication, sharing protocols, methods, data and beyond. Such an infrastructure should be ubiquitous, international, free to access for all and should allow efficient discovery, communication and translation.

At Digital Science, we believe that many of the different aspects of research need to be shared as openly as possible. Openness in research has the capacity to improve both research itself and its long-term societal impact. Of course, the research ecosystem is not simple – data privacy and many other factors need to be considered but, broadly, getting the most useful findings into the right hands with the lowest possible barriers to reuse and further development is in everyone’s interest. These principles lie at the heart of openness – they are what can make research beneficial to humanity as a whole. Open research is not just about Open Access. It aims to promote transparency throughout the research lifecycle: from funding, through research methodology and data sharing, to evaluation and impact. It is also a key tenet of a healthy research culture that is open to, and supportive of, all people and ideas; a global community where knowledge is shared freely.

In recent years, a reproducibility crisis has arisen in the research community. The key to ensuring all research is reproducible is to document and report details of methods, equipment, analytical software, and data as accurately and openly as possible. While it is up to researchers to ensure that happens, we know that the burden of implementing a workflow that allows research to be tracked and documented in a transparent way can be costly and complex. Our focus is to support the community on their path to openness by developing and implementing elegant and interoperable technological solutions.

We’ve been busy working on ways to help you carry on where possible during the COVID-19 crisis. Read on to find out how Overleaf and Writefull can support remote researchers’ academic writing, how Dimensions and ReadCube are opening up access to content, and how Figshare is helping share content that would have been presented at conferences, among other things!