The OCSDNet Manifesto is a result of one year of participatory consultations and debates amongst members of the ‘Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network’ (OCSDNet), a network of 12 research-practitioner teams from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Through research projects grounded in diverse regions and disciplines, OCSDNet members explore the scope of Open Science as a transformative tool for development thinking and practice and offer the ‘Open and Collaborative Science Manifesto’ as a foundation upon which to reclaim the mainstream narrative about what Open Science means and how it can realise a more inclusive science in development. This paper describes the mechanisms used for collaboration and consensus building, and explores the ways in which the process of building this document serves as a case study for the opportunities and limitations of integrating collaboration, opportunities for participation and openness into research activities.

What is open science and under what conditions could it contribute towards addressing persistent development challenges? How could we re-imagine and enrich open science so that it is inclusive of local realities and a diversity of knowledge traditions? These are some of the questions that the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet) is attempting to answer. In this paper, we provide the rationale and principles underlying OCSDnet, the conceptual and methodological frameworks guiding the research, and preliminary findings from the network's twelve globally diverse research projects. Instead of a “one-size-fits-all” approach to open science, our findings suggest that it is important to take into account the local dynamics and power structures that affect the ways in which individuals tend to collaborate (or not) within particular contexts. Despite the on-going resistance of powerful actors towards new forms of creating and sharing diverse knowledge, concluding evidence from the twelve research teams suggests that open science does indeed have an important role to play in facilitating inclusive collaboration and transformatory possibilities for development.