When privacy-bound research pays for open science - EuroScientist journal

"A new open science business model charges those who want to keep information private to subsidise those who share it

In theory, open science should involve students and scholars from developing regions too. Yet, there is still an imbalance between developed and developing countries, as research is not yet truly open. Colleagues in developing countries are often relegated to the position of second-tier scientists, partly living from intellectual and financial charity from developed countries.

In many cases, they are penalised by sub-optimal Internet access and insufficient research funds to subscribe to pay-walled scientific literature. Meanwhile, the advent of open access journals only partly solves their problem. They now need exceptions to publication fees, just like HINARI, a joint initiative between WHO and publishers, is an exception to reading fees.

To support open science, it is time to radically change the business models for scholarly communication, way beyond just open access articles. The idea is to draw the line very differently, following a new logic. Only those who wish to keep research discoveries private, pay. Others have free authorship and copyright if they are prepared to share their knowledge without restrictions.

This logic would introduce a bias towards greater and faster sharing of scientific discovery and give a boost to open science. And more importantly, it could open the door to millions of scientists from developing regions to take part to future advances in research....

To illustrate how it could work in practice, see our case study, focusing on disease mechanism discovery. This is not very different from dual licensing in open source software. In such case, if users do not want to share their additional code, because it is to be re-used within a proprietary software product, they have to pay.

A great opportunity to make great strides in this direction is offered by the recently announced European Open Science Cloud, a virtual environment to store, share and re-use their data across disciplines and borders.

To me, the proposed approach would be more just a model, than the current open access model, where people publishing in open access need to pay. The new model would request that people keeping things private collectively subsidise the open realm of our knowledge creation. This logic calls for the development of closed as well as open services, business models and partnerships in science...."