Open science debate gains traction but no consensus

The COVID-19 pandemic has created urgency around consultations on shared values and principles that would hasten global access to data, research, publications and technological innovations.

Towards this goal, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is in the process of mobilising countries to support the ‘open science’ initiative as part of efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus, and prepare for similar future global crises.

Of the 121 countries that recently met to discuss the need for stepping up information-sharing through open science, 32 were African countries. “Africa needs a strong research enterprise and open science can address some of the existing inequalities,” said Sarah Anyang Agbor, the commissioner for human resources, science and technology at the African Union Commission.

According to Dr Angela Sarcina, a science policy expert at UNESCO, ‘open science’ is an umbrella term encompassing concepts and definitions related to the way knowledge is created and disseminated. It includes practices such as publishing open scientific research, campaigning for open access and making it easier to publish and communicate scientific knowledge.

“In a nutshell, open science is a movement to make scientific research and data accessible to all,” Sarcina told University World News in an interview.

The benefits of science

In the context of pressing global challenges such as COVID-19, open science is expected to provide a platform for vibrant scientific research and innovative solutions. UNESCO’s plan is to extend science and data sharing beyond the research community, or scientists talking to each other, to open science to benefit the wider society.

“We all depend on science to survive,” Marcos Pontes, the Brazilian minister of science and technology, told delegates who recently attended UNESCO’s online meeting on open science.

However, even in the face of COVID-19, there are obstacles preventing open science, as proposed by UNESCO and other stakeholders, from becoming a reality, especially in developing countries, starting with an understanding of what exactly open science is or should be.

Two researchers, Dr Benedikt Fecher, the head of the ‘Knowledge Dimension’ research programme at the Berlin-based Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and Sascha Friesike, an assistant professor for digital innovation at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, have identified five schools of thought that provide different interpretations of the concept of open science.

In a pioneering study, Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought, Fecher and Friesike highlight the existence of a number of approaches, ranging from the infrastructure school of thought that advocates the creation and sharing of efficient platforms, tools and services among scientists and technological providers only, to the “measurement school of thought”, which calls for a robust alternative metric system for scientific impact and quick peer review.

“This school argues the case for faster impact measurement that includes other forms of publication and the social web coverage of a scientific contribution,” stated Fecher and Friesike.

The “public school of thought” aims to make science accessible to all, the “populist democratic school of ideas” has an ambition to make knowledge freely available for everyone, while the “pragmatic school of thought” calls for collaborative research among scientists and researchers.

No consensus yet

Reached for comment, Professor Tim Unwin, the UNESCO chair in ICT for Development (ICT4D), said it might take time before the world reaches consensus on the open science debate. “The issue is that open publishing would limit many writers from receiving any financial benefit from their writing, while to some, writing is their only source of income,” said Unwin.

According to Unwin, the entire issue of open science should be seen in terms of funding academic labour and to this extent, some of the current open access initiatives are already damaging. “For instance, journals that require authors to pay if they have papers accepted, but then make the journal freely available, I think, are far more discriminatory and closed than traditional publishing,” Unwin told University World News in an online interview.

Explaining the difficulty in attaining an open science environment as advocated by the public and democratic schools of thought, Unwin said in a real sense it would be hard for science to be truly open, as not everyone can reach the highest level of research expertise. “We must also not forget that publishers have a key role in supporting academic publishing, and they need to cover their costs,” said Unwin.

Similarly, research think tanks and high-ranking universities make heavy investments in researchers, scientists and cutting-edge laboratories, and are eager to generate revenue from the intellectual property rights of their staff. According to Unwin, such institutions will be unwilling to offer their innovations and other research findings for free on the internet.

However, in the light of the interest created by the open science movement among the scientific community investors, entrepreneurs and policy-makers, UNESCO has jump-started a process of building understanding, and creating opportunities and challenges within the open science landscape.

Roadmap

In this regard, a consolidated roadmap that could eventually lead to a global voluntary recommendation on open science, has been launched and will be submitted for consideration by the UNESCO General Conference at its 41st session in 2021.

According to Professor Joseph Wafula, a member of the African Open Science Platform, a body whose ambition is to put African scientists at the cutting edge of contemporary and data-intensive science, open science will become an enabler for global scientific partnership.

“We should move away from a world in which we maintain exclusive access to data we have created, to a regime where researchers are able to access a wide diversity of data streams,” said Wafula, a data scientist at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.

While COVID-19 may have raised awareness about the importance of science, both in research and international cooperation, as Unwin points out, hard questions still lie ahead about who most top scientists work for: business enterprises, governments, or charity?