Stories

Civic Science Fellow Eunice Mercado-Lara Turns Open-Science Talk into Action

Applying for funding can be a time-consuming, opaque process that presents barriers for some applicants, particularly smaller, under-resourced organizations. 2021-23 Civic Science Fellow Eunice Mercado-Lara is working to make the process easier, fairer, and more transparent.

During her Fellowship at the Open Research Funders Group, Mercado-Lara created a blueprint for funders to follow that includes dozens of actions a grantor can take to reduce friction and increase openness. Today, as Director of Equity & Impact at the Open Research Community Accelerator, which works to make science more engaging, accessible, and actionable, she’s busy stress-testing that blueprint.

Mercado-Lara’s bridge-building instinct traces back to 2013, when she began working with Mexico’s science ministry to draft what would become a groundbreaking policy initiative. “I designed the open access policy first, then encouraged and convinced the ministry to evolve it towards an open science policy,” she says.

While open access is about making research results available, open science goes further, addressing the entire scientific process: the methods, data, and everything that happens between approving a grant and disseminating the results. This comprehensive approach created transparency at every stage of research, not just at publication, making Mexico the first country to enact a national open science policy.

But being a pioneer was a very lonely journey, Mercado-Lara says. “No precedents, no playbook. Just me, a blank policy template, and a lot of late nights.”

After leaving the ministry in 2019, Mercado-Lara consulted for governments in Panama, Colombia, and Canada on their open science and innovation policies. Meanwhile, she kept tracking global conferences and email lists, looking for fellow travelers. During this time, she connected with Greg Tananbaum and learned about the organization he was then leading, the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG), which convenes foundations and philanthropies that require or encourage grantees to make research findings freely available to all.

This mission aligned perfectly with Mercado-Lara’s open science vision, so when ORFG proposed a Civic Science Fellowship, she saw an opportunity to expand her impact beyond government policy and applied.

From pain points to playbook

Arriving at ORFG as a Fellow in 2021, Mercado-Lara spent six months in listening mode, conducting interviews, hosting open Zoom calls, and running surveys. In the process, she amassed a collection of pain points, such as impenetrable PDFs, reviewer pools that all looked the same, and journal fees that crushed early-career scholars.

Practical solutions to these challenges formed the foundation of the Open & Equitable Model Funding Program, a playbook of 32 interventions mapped neatly onto every stage of grant making. This became the basis for a pilot study that included 11 funders, from small charities to big international philanthropies. After hashing out how these interventions might be adapted to align with organizational missions and values, most chose a handful of specific practices to road-test across a single grant cycle.

One of the most popular pilots was training for grant reviewers and program staff to learn to identify and combat implicit bias, with five participating funders rolling out bias-awareness workshops for their review panels. Another five opted to simplify their reporting practices to reduce the burden on grantees.

One foundation invested in a biweekly, two-hour science communication workshop to coach grantees on how to draft blog posts, create social media threads, and draft policy briefs. Though feedback has been positive, she stresses that measuring impact is tough, and it will take multiple grant cycles before the cohort sees hard data on which interventions truly move the needle.

“Most organizations went small: pilot, analyze, decide,” Mercado-Lara says. Momentum, however, was fragile. “After the quick wins, some teams lost steam. Keeping people inside the messy middle is the next design challenge.”

As the work continued, Mercado-Lara began to recognize that open practices and policies alone wouldn’t equalize opportunity. The next step was to ensure that all researchers, not just those from well-funded universities, had the skills and infrastructure to implement those practices. Along with her colleagues, she launched a new organization—the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA)—to foster innovative cross-sector coalitions.

The new team began by creating the Catalytic Awards program, supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to award micro-grants to minority-serving or otherwise under-resourced institutions to use for time-limited, hands-on projects that stimulate a culture of openness.

One of the 18 inaugural awards underwrote a library-hosted workshop series, teaching scholars how to identify reputable open access journals, negotiate article-processing charges, and archive accepted manuscripts in free repositories. Another award funded a hands-on training program in data stewardship, giving researchers at under-resourced institutions the skills to curate, share, and preserve their datasets so anyone can access them.

“Now I’m the program officer who has to live by the rules I wrote,” she laughs. ORCA’s application window is flexible, the rubric public, reporting requirements stripped to essentials—exactly the playbook in motion.

While 2020 felt like a boom time for open science, 2025 has brought headwinds. “Some funders worry the words ‘equity’ or ‘open’ make them targets,” she says. Others fear that releasing raw data could fuel conspiracy theories.

Her practical fix is translation: A breast-cancer charity frames equity as “demographic fidelity” in tissue banks; a climate foundation talks about “community-verified data” instead of open data. “The principles stay the same—you meet interest holders where they live.” These types of tweaks are regularly fed back into ORCA’s guidance, keeping this work evergreen.

Champions in community

Mercado-Lara is also the first former Fellow on a team that mentors new cohorts, which includes individuals from Team Civic Science: institutional host Greg Tananbaum of ORCA; Learning-Lab planners Jeanne Garbarino and Emily Costa of The Rockefeller University; and Eliza Fisher from the Rita Allen Foundation.

The team offers focused mentoring through three avenues: a “navigation template” that provides a weekly map of what to read, whom to meet, and how to draft a theory of change during the dizzy first 90 days of the Fellowship; open virtual office hours—especially vital at month three, when Fellows tend to encounter their first obstacles and may experience imposter syndrome; and a “capstone studio” that helps Fellows turn messy lessons into a final product employers can grasp.

Beyond the formal structures, Mercado-Lara sees her role as emotional ballast. “My job is to help them to enjoy the ride even when knowing it’s going to be bumpy, reassure them that whatever they are exploring is usually at least directionally right, and make them feel comfortable in the discomfort of not knowing what’s coming next.”

She sees the roughly three dozen current Fellows weekly at Tuesday Learning Labs, where topics have ranged from negotiating with risk-averse legal teams to co-designing research with distrustful communities. Her favorite sessions “make the discomfort explicit, then normalize it,” Mercado-Lara says. “Feeling lost is okay,” she tells newcomers. “We’re boundary-spanners; we live in the discomfort and translate it into action.”

This experience reinforces her belief that success can’t be measured by citation counts or policy memos. “I look for reduced loneliness,” she says. “When a champion finds peers, when a funder keeps an intervention alive after the pilot, when a Fellow leaves Tuesday Lab smiling instead of spiraling—that’s a bridge that will hold.”

Recalling her own solitary nights drafting Mexico’s policy a decade ago, Mercado-Lara says, “Not feeling lonely in that precise moment of your life—that might be the biggest structural change of all. Champions in community can move mountains.”

Mercado-Lara is a member of the 2021-23 Civic Science Fellows cohort. Her Fellowship was supported by the Rita Allen Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Burroughs Wellcome Fund.