Built to last! Embedding open science principles and practice into European universities

Introduction

Open science as cultural change

Open science, that is open research and open scholarship in all disciplines, is a different way of pursuing scholarship. Today, science is carried out in a highly competitive framework. Researchers and organizations compete to promote their scientific assumptions, to win funds, to be the first to discover something or find solutions, and/or to get the best publication space to communicate their success and make their conclusions shine. In this landscape, researchers compete to publish more, compete for attention, and/or compete to win comparative assessments. There is an important observation we should make here: competition is about winning a race where the rules are set by others. Success is measured by someone else’s definition of it. Competition is one important element of human progress, but it is not the only one and it usually works better when it is related to other elements, like collaboration.

The authors of this article started to organize a series of events on open science throughout Europe in 2015. The series is called Focus on Open Science,3 with a mission to promote the concept of, values for and best practices in open science to European communities. Each of these events (called chapters) is organized in close collaboration with a local academic institution, in this way determining each year the topics that are most suitable to be discussed within their own open science landscape, but having in mind the overall recommendations on open science from the European Commission (EC). The series started with one chapter in Ljubljana and the team went on to deliver 11 events in 2019.4 We reached a number of conclusions during these events and many of them have helped us to orient this opinion piece.

Open science is a different way of conducting research in which collaboration stands right next to competition. This novel route is able to unlock further resources as well as create a more stable, distributed, powerful and sustainable infrastructure that is more efficient than it otherwise might have been. Yes, we do also suggest that funders should look again at the type of research they fund, possibly less oriented to project-based investments. Research investments should match ideas and not the opposite. Great ideas are currently shaped to fit calls for projects and are sacrificed if the competition barometer does not predict success.

In scholarly communication, in particular, which has been transformed from avenues of communication into a network of publication with metrics and analytics, we can see important areas left undeveloped. The results of research are more likely to be published if they are positive. Instead of growing a culture for disseminating the (ultimately important) results of research activity that was conducted rigorously, under a solid methodology which produced important data sets, we have built a system that is doing so only if the results are positive, a system that is pushing for certain areas of exploration that are more likely to win the metrics competition. Editors should not make a decision for publication based on results alone. They should do so based on the rigour of the research process and how the results contribute with all their elements to the field of study: from data sets to algorithms and to conclusions.

We would like to highlight what we consider to be the most fundamental difference between locked science (closed science, where data sets are locked in private archives) and open science. Today, locked science is performed within a highly competitive framework, as described above. Competitive research is tracked numerically; researchers keep making comparisons between colleagues and wanting to win.

Competition is built around the verb ‘to have’ and increases the sense of ownership. Collaboration is built around the verb ‘to be’ and, amongst other things, it opens up opportunities for new ways of performance. Combining the principles of competition and collaboration, we can obtain the right level of ownership in research (from knowledge to infrastructure) and the right model for collaborative performance that will ensure recognition and sustainability.