Access to Science & Scholarship 2024 Building an evidence base to support the future of open research policy

"The following research questions resulted from Access to Science & Scholarship 2024: Building an evidence base to support the future of open research policy, a workshop organized by the MIT Press and funded by the National Science Foundation. The workshop was held on September 20, 2024, in Washington, DC. Presentations and panel–audience engagement throughout the workshop generated many interesting discussion points and potential research questions (which were captured in the workshop summary report). Below, those questions have been consolidated and prioritized to focus on those that are both critical and most actionable in terms of building the evidence base to support open research policy going forward.

1. How can scenario modeling be used to better model and anticipate the outcomes (including unintended consequences) of science communication policy, whether as the result of new policies or changes to existing policies (e.g., what are the potential impacts of immediate Green open access policies on subscription revenues for publishers and subscription spend for universities)? Through what mechanisms can stakeholders (e.g., policy-setting bodies like governments and funders, researchers, publishers, librarians) come together for productive scenario modeling?

2. What standardized measures are needed to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of open science policies and practices?

3. What are the challenges and benefits of peer review, and how do they differ across disciplines, models of peer review, and types of scientific output? What evaluations are needed to assess the impact of current models of peer review, as well as new and emerging models? How effective are peer review badges (or other indicators of the level of peer review) at signaling trust for readers? What are current incentives and barriers for individual scholars to engage in peer review activities, and how might they be adjusted to better encourage and reward productive peer review? 

4. What will the impact of current open science policies be on university presses and research associations/societies? For societies/associations that rely on subscription revenues to fund other activities, what new funding/business models are emerging, and how can they be assessed? Likewise, should the funding models for university presses be revisited?

5. What are the costs to researchers and their institutions of open data policies under different implementation scenarios? How can funders and institutions ensure these costs are covered for their funded researchers?

6. How are research data reused, what is required to make them reusable, and how does that vary from field to field? What is the differential value of data sharing and archiving depending on field of research, data types, and repurposing use cases? What policy interventions are likely to be most effective across disciplines and data types?

7. What are the administrative burdens of open science policy (including both access to research papers and open data) compliance for researchers, and how does that differ across disciplines, output types, institutional support, etc.? What opportunities exist to mitigate and/or lower the administrative burden for individual researchers?

8. How does the community, the general public, and the media use preprint servers? Is there trend data or other indicators that would help us predict the growth and role of preprint services over the next five years? How might the preprint publishing model evolve to meet global research dissemination demands during emergent, high-impact challenges to knowledge creation and access? What are the broader implications of decoupling dissemination from validation?

9. What models can be developed to support the long-term maintenance, development, and innovation of scholarly communications infrastructure such as preprint servers, metadata standards, persistent identifiers, data repositories, etc.? What elements are critical to designing the shared infrastructure that will underpin scholarly communications (e.g., governance models, proprietary vs. open models)? How can we ensure that such infrastructure is financially supported such that it can continue to evolve to support science? "