OPEN – Contribution to the AGATE Workshop January 16th, 2017 – Digital Intellectuals

"Open Science is generally considered to have several components: Open Educational Resources, Open Access, Open Peer Review, Open Methodology, Open Source, Open Data. Ulrike Wuttke concentrated in her presentation mainly on Open Access. While Open Educational Resources do not belong to the core missions of Academies, I would like to draw a line back to the other dimensions which Ulrike mentioned only briefly and that are to my eyes as important as the fact of being guided by the ideal of Open Access.

Academy projects in SSH tend to be blackboxes. The only output made accessible is the final, published version of the research data, that is the publications, the secondary data. It is equally important to make accessible not only the primary data (raw material), but also documentation on the workflow and on the methodology. This is encompassed by three of the categories mentioned before in the definition: Open Source (for software and other digital tools), Open Data (for raw data) and Open Methodology (by making one’s methodology transparent and hence the results verifiable and reproducible).

Now truth be told these are domains in which SSH scholars are unexperienced. They are clueless about how to conceive access to information that until now had always been reserved to hidden backyards and only needed to be understandable for a restricted group of scholars, the one that carried out the project. We definitely need to put some specific effort into this. The real question here is not only to find the adequate format to make such data, software or methods accessible per se, but also to make them accessible in such a way that they are useful and reusable. For research data, this means that openness must be accompanied by standards, by publication and replication methods and pedagogy on these topics as well as by evaluation criteria that allow the data and methods to be integrated not only in the research data ecosystem, but also in the academic reputation lifecycle. This is where we need the last pillar of the definition of Open Science I mentioned before, namely Open Peer Review. I am not completely sure that Open Peer Review is the magical answer here. But we certainly need a form of leverage that allows academic recognition of all the information circulating in the context of Open Science and which, as I just explained, goes way beyond scientific publications, which are secondary data. Some of this leverage can be gained from constraining policies like H2020 requiring EU-funded research data to be made open. But this top-down approach does not necessarily convince the scholars implementing them that it makes sense for their research."