Jisc futures: our ‘painfully slow’ progress towards the goal of open science

"My conclusion is that, in both the UK and US, definite progress is being made towards the goal of open science. However, changing cultures towards the new reality of data-intensive science sometimes seems painfully slow.

Jim Gray had a vision that all scientific data would be made available online and linked to the corresponding open access journal articles. His inspiration was the US National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, which, in addition to providing the curated PubMed Central repository for the full text of NIH-funded research papers, also provides links to a large set of curated databases such as GenBank and PubChem.

Gray believed, as I do, that if we can populate these institutional, funding agency and subject repositories with open access research papers linked to the corresponding datasets, this would lead to a huge increase in scientific productivity.

Given the environmental and medical challenges facing the world, open science is needed as a matter of urgency."