When You Work in the Open, Everyone Can Be a Collaborator | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"Open access is the practice of making research available online, for free, ideally under licenses that permit widespread dissemination. This year’s theme for Open Access Week is 'open for collaboration,' and that theme hits on what’s really exciting about open access. Open access—both in academia and beyond—enables a kind of collaboration that can scale very quickly. When research is closed, no one can access it unless they (or, more often, the institutions where they work or study) can afford expensive journal subscriptions or online libraries. When research is open, anyone can access it, study it, and use it, regardless of their budget or institutional affiliation. Open access also opens the door to a type of collaboration that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Authors that publish their research in an open access journal—or deposit it in an open access repository after publication—invite others to use it and transform it in ways that they might not have even imagined. The work can become part of a larger project, expanding the body of public knowledge even more. Last month, Business Insider interviewed Mark Hahnel, founder and CEO of Figshare, an open access platform for raw datasets and figures. According to Hahnel, one problem with traditional science publishing is that many journals don’t publish negative results, meaning that scientists unknowingly repeat the same experiments as each other ..."