Beyond Open Access: The Discovery of Knowledge | Article | CCCB LAB

"We have repositories, we have open access journals, we have policies, we even have laws[3] that impose open access. But what is the situation now? In summer 2013, the European Commission published the results of a study it had commissioned, which found that we had reached the tipping point given that around 50% of publications dating from 2011 could be accessed free of charge. It would be impossible to reach this figure just with the texts in repositories, because the percentage of articles that are accessible to the public is quite a lot lower. Nonetheless, the introduction of stronger mandates, such as the obligation to deposit and allow public access to any article resulting from projects funded by the European research framework has increased researchers’ interest in and concern over open access. But perhaps we are at a point where we have to look beyond publications. Research results can take very diverse forms, and as such we need to transfer this idea of openness in publications to these other objects. The first steps are being taken in the field of data. Some publications now require the data generated or used in a research project to be published along with the texts. It’s not enough to read how the results were attained, authors are required to submit the data so that they can be reproduced. To this end, a pilot project has been launched within the Horizon 2020 European research funding programme. The aim of this project is to publicly release the data that is generated or compiled in research projects, so that they can be used extensively, promoting their management and preservation. We can go a little further still and consider openness in other stages of research, not just when a set of results has been produced. In fact, some researchers already share everything they do on a daily basis[4] or publish every line of code that they generate through public access servers, allowing it to be reused ..."