Open Science has been institutionalised in Switzerland in the past years, in-line with Swissuniversities, the European Commission’s, OECD, and UNESCO recommendations (EuropeanCommission 2020; OECD 2021; Swissuniversities No date; UNESCO 2021). Policies and support exist at national and institutional levels to guide the different stakeholders (e.g. Universite-de-Genève 2020). In contrast, for Open Education, Switzerland does not have any national policy yet but several initiatives around the topic are flourishing throughout the country (e.g. ZWAH institutional OER policy, Digital academy skills, Swiss OE day, SNSF scientific exchange: A Roadmap for Open Education in Switzerland: First Steps, UNIGE-HES-SO mandate, etc.).
In the MENA region, the movement is rather the opposite. Open Education has been well developed through several international projects supported by the European Commission, ALECSO and different organisations (e.g. ALECSO 2019; OERWiki@MENA 2021; OpenBookProject 2014; OpenMed 2015; UNIMED 2018) with growing OERs libraries and national and institutional policies in the making (e.g. OpenMed 2016). Open Science though is still in its infancy.
Within this project, we will build on each other’s expertise in terms of Open Science and Open Education to educate scholars of the Swiss-MENA region to the Open paradigm. Indeed, the ultimate goal of this research project is to create a pool of scholars from the 5 countries involved (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Switzerland) who deeply understand the Open paradigm and act as catalysts and disseminators with the backdrop of an international network of Open scholars. We argue that this is a Swiss-Mediterranean contribution to the building of the collective intelligence needed to craft the knowledge society (Innerarity 2015).