SCIENCE IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST, OR FOR YOUR OWN POCKET?
ACHIEVING THE PUBLIC INTEREST THROUGH THE PRINCIPLES OF OPEN SCIENCE – SCIENCE WITHOUT BORDERS
Picture the following situation. One weekend, you were helping your grandmother to clean their attic and you found an old, dusty, but well-preserved guitar. You have a fair amount of free time on your hands, so you decide to clean it and learn how to play it. First, you try it out by yourself, you see that you have some talent and a good ear, but you still need some manuals, books, and other learning tools to progress. Interaction with someone who plays the guitar would also come in handy. However, you find out that in your area all musical knowledge is exclusively shared between a close circle of professional musicians who hold a key to the music library with essential instructional material and a rich repository of sheet music. They gather exclusively in the closed quarters of the music school where they play together and exchange tips. So, you decide to keep learning by yourself, catching melodies by ear with the help of a few old magazines you also found in the attic, near the guitar.
After a year, you visit your friend who you haven’t seen for a long time because he lives in a different town. You notice that he also plays the guitar and does it much better. Not only that, the professional musicians in his area are better as well. As you are catching up, he explains how they are all interacting on a regular basis to play together, practice, and exchange tips. The music school has open Fridays when they have jam sessions with hobbyists, street musicians, and other enthusiasts. Their music library is open to all citizens. They are constantly creating new songs, developing alternative techniques and experimenting with sounds, rhythms and time signatures. These musicians have developed their efforts around three simple but essential principles: transparency, sharing, and inclusiveness at all stages of their learning process and creative endeavours. This enabled them to interact, cooperate, create, innovate, and achieve excellence on the group and individual levels. This also translates to their community which is enjoying more frequent and higher-level musical performances, richer musical heritage, and greater social cohesion.
The same principles represent the foundations of open science as a movement and a set of concrete practices developed around an aim to make research processes, data, and information open and accessible as much as possible.
A VISION OF OPEN SCIENCE IS TO ESTABLISH A MORE INCLUSIVE, COLLABORATIVE, JUST, AND DEMOCRATIC RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT ON THE GLOBAL LEVEL USING CONTEMPORARY DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AND CO-CREATION TOOLS FOR THE BENEFIT OF SCIENCE AND SOCIETY.
This is being achieved by implementing and improving concepts and practices such as open data, FAIR principles, open access, new metrics for research assessments, and citizen science. This is not an exhaustive list, and each element of open science has many measurable indicators, so each can be a topic in itself. For the purposes of this text, we will cover only a few essential concepts.
Open data means that data should be available for everyone to access, use and share in all stages of the scientific process. This covers early access, access throughout the research process and long-term access after the process is finished through open repositories such as Zenodo. There are cases in which nonselective sharing of data can have negative societal consequences. When such risks outweigh the benefits it could be argued that some form of access restrictions are justified. FAIR principles are related to the characteristics of data and metadata (information about data) making sure that they are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The basic idea is that the data should be as open as possible, and as closed as necessary.
The open access principle focuses on publishing and ensures that scientific publications are available online without charge. This includes peer-reviewed journal articles, but also research reports, conference papers, etc., published through platforms which ensure open access or uploaded on open-access repositories.
New metrics for research assessments assume moving beyond traditional, mostly quantitative indicators for research assessment such as journal impact factors and citation numbers as the primary indicators of research quality. The goal is to broaden the range of indicators so we can see the wider value, significance and impact of scientific research. The vision is to create an environment in which working on one’s scientific career and doing high-quality, high-impact science the same thing. Today, these two pursuits are, unfortunately, often in conflict.
Citizen science is about the participation of citizens and other non-experts in all possible stages of research and the production of scientific knowledge. This improves the quality of research, increases the efficiency of the data-gathering process, makes the process of creating scientific knowledge more inclusive, and connects science with other spheres of society. For example, approximately half of all records managed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) are connected to citizen science.
OPEN SCIENCE HAS NEVER BEEN AS RELEVANT AND CRUCIAL AS NOW WHEN WE FACE GLOBAL CHALLENGES SUCH AS CLIMATE CHANGE.
Global challenges require global collaborative efforts, and global collaborative efforts require systemic changes in order to be effective and sustainable. Open science as an umbrella term and an evolving concept has the proven potential to provide the framework for these systemic changes in the field of research and innovation that is crucial for increasing the social impact of scientific knowledge. This is why open science is one of the policy priorities of the European Commission and is fully supported by reputable organizations such as CESAER and the League of European Research Universities. It also represents one of the major pillars of ERA Priorities as the first action of the ERA Policy Agenda 2022-2024.
On the operative level, various platforms have been established to fast-track the implementation of open science principles including the European Open Science Cloud, the Open Science Policy Platform, the European Open Data Portal, and the European Citizen Science Platform. Nonetheless, even when we have the necessary digital infrastructure to scale up open science principles and implement relevant policy in this domain, we have failed in many instances to do so, even when facing serious global challenges. For example, 65% of the data on the topic of Ebola wasn’t openly shared during the crisis from 2014 To 2016.
THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC FURTHER REVEALED A NEED FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF OPEN SCIENCE PRACTICES AND SHOWED CONCRETE RESULTS IN THE SCOPE IN WHICH THEY WERE IMPLEMENTED.
Around 40% of all academic articles had open access during the time of the pandemic. In 2021. if we take a look at the articles related to COVID-19, the open access share was over 85%. We can take this as a paradigmatic example of the potential of open science as it proved to be essential in managing the pandemic.
Global challenges make the benefits of open science clearly visible, but improving these practices create benefits on the regional, national, institutional and individual levels as well. Democratization of knowledge supports public participation in the decision-making process, informs policy and improves social cohesion.
Open science practices enable researchers to enhance the visibility, quality and impact of their research, get more funding opportunities (compliance with increasingly stricter requirements of research funding programmes), and increase international collaboration and participation in collaborative projects.
On the individual level, citizen science increases individuals’ capacity and understanding of the scientific method, develops critical thinking, improves functional scientific literacy, and promotes lifelong learning. And finally, engagement of non-experts in citizen science efforts increases the sense of ownership of scientific outputs and provides wider social benefits such as public trust in science.
It is crucial for universities, research organizations and our society, in general, to follow advancements in the field of open science, and implement relevant policies and good practices that are aligned with our socio-economic specifics and public interest.
Author: Siniša Borota, sociologist
Picture: Downloaded from Freepik