Scientific journal publishing, academic reward systems, and the lack of a common, interoperable data infrastructure are some of the obstacles that stand in the way of “open science.” So says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which examined free access to all the products of research, including scholarly publications, the data that result from research, and the methodologies, including algorithms, that were used to generate the data.
The committee that wrote the report, chaired by Alexa McCray of Harvard University, started with the assumption that open access from the outset of the research process is the most desirable state. The entirety of the research process, from its beginning through archiving of results, data, and tools used, should be made more open—a concept the report calls “open science by design.”
“We have to change the culture within the research community so open science becomes the easy, accepted, and default path of least resistance,” says Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “It will require the combined efforts of many stakeholders, including funders, universities, journals, and scientific societies, to change the culture and to reward the right behaviors. It will require development of technologies to grease the paths of least resistance. Most of all, it will require leadership.”
Some progress has already been made toward open science. New standards for data and code sharing in biomedical research and psychology are making it easier for researchers to reproduce results. And large-scale projects in astronomy, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, are using open data, providing opportunities for citizen scientists to contribute to advances. Data collected by NASA’s astronomy spacecraft have been freely available (after a proprietary period) in standard formats for decades.
Opening barriers
But many barriers to open science remain. Sharing data, code, and other research products isn’t routine, and most scientific articles are available only on a subscription basis. The report says that academic institutions will need to change their current reward system, which can discourage open-science practices by pressuring scientists, particularly early-career researchers, to publish their work in journals with high impact factors. Those journals are overwhelmingly subscription based, with closed mechanisms for reporting results.
“Overuse and misuse of bibliographic metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor in the evaluation of research and researchers is one important ‘bug’ in the operation of the research enterprise that has a detrimental effect across disciplines,” the report says. Since the cost of publishing in a subscription journal is negligible, a researcher also has a financial disincentive to publish in an open-access journal, where article-processing charges are the norm.
Impact factors have grown in importance among research funders as well; for biomedical research in the US, for instance, the most significant predictor of National Institutes of Health funding is the weighted sum of impact factors of journals where principal investigators publish, a recent study found.
The report recommends that universities and funders work together to come up with alternative metrics for assessing the impacts of research that value open-science practices. Universities should evaluate the impact of interim research products such as preprints, with a view toward comparing those with current impact measures. Broader measures of a researcher’s scientific contribution could include giving credit for peer review, data and code creation, replicability of results, and publication in open-access journals.
As for alternative research metrics for funders, McNutt suggests that NSF could consider adding an investigator’s open-science plan as a new major criterion during its merit review of proposals.
Scientific societies that publish subscription-based journals will be severely challenged by open-science practices, and they should move to transition from current business models to new open-access models, the report notes. The government and other research funders should explore ways to support that transition.
Universities and professional societies should train students and other researchers to implement open-science practices effectively and should support the development of educational programs that foster open science throughout the research process, the report says.
A new generation of information technology tools brings with it the ability to automate the process of searching and analyzing linked articles and data; this can reveal patterns that would escape human perception, making the process of generating and testing hypotheses faster and more efficient, the report says. These tools and services will have maximum impact when used within an open-science framework that spans institutional, national, and disciplinary boundaries. For that to occur, the data created from research and the software tools and algorithms used to analyze them must be accessible by humans and by machines.
The report endorses the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles that are currently being adopted as part of the European Open Science Cloud initiative of the European Commission. To be FAIR compliant, data used or produced in a research project must be discoverable with metadata and be identifiable and locatable by means of a standard identification mechanism, such as persistent and unique digital object identifiers (DOIs).
Research funders and universities should work together to fund and provide the infrastructure needed for long-term preservation, stewardship, and community control of research products. This infrastructure could be supported by direct costs or through an earmarked percentage of each funded grant, the report suggests.
