The gulf between the open science movement and academics | Software Sustainability Institute

"When running a couple of workshops later last year, I spoke at length on a number of aspects of open science. This included software sustainability, data and software licensing, collaboration and manuscript writing. I was inspired by this fantastic paper posted on ArXiv from Greg Wilson et al. I will caveat this text with the fact I am not a lawyer and none of the text below should be taken as legal advice.

After running these two workshops—'Tools for Constructing the Tree of Life' and 'Good enough practice in Computational Geography'—and speaking to the attendees, I realised there is a disturbingly large gulf between those involved in the open science movement and the rest of academia. Many participants knew the words 'open access' and 'open source', but conflated the ideas and didn't link any licences to these terms. There was also a lot of confusion on what licences to use and which were appropriate, as well as the concept of copyright. Unfortunately, academics have to rely on the lawyers available at their institution, which are on the side of the University, and not necessarily on the side of an academic who wants to make their work more open. Stories of conflicts between PhD students and supervisors over what could and could not be done with data and software were quite common. So it was clear to me that a gap of knowledge exists here.

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How can we then mitigate against such copyright issues so we make sure research outputs are freely available for in the future? A real difference could be made by informing incoming PhD students, or even undergraduates, about the virtues of open science and open source software, copyright issues, and what this means. An academic should be able to concentrate on their teaching and research, but the complications and caveats of licensing often makes not releasing software the easy option. Hence, this has a direct impact on sustainable software with conflicts arising when a knowledgeable PhD student, postdoc or even help from other sources, such as the Institute Research Software Engineers, contribute to software efforts.  Greater knowledge instilled at an early career stage might help academics feel more confident in knowing what they are allowed to do with their software and data."