Openness: An interview with Daniel Hook, CEO of Digital Science - The Scholarly Kitchen

"I think that biggest barrier is the existing system of incentives – people are not made professor for making their research openly available — that needs to change. The current system was never built to scale to the current size of the research world. I think that there will be some radical changes in scholarly communication and evaluation. Research, however, is quite rightly a conservative world. Systems need to be tried and tested – we can’t afford to switch to a system that is susceptible to effects like fake news.  So, I don’t think that change will happen quickly....

As a researcher, I want it to be simple. I don’t want to have to find money from different pots to publish my work. I don’t want to have to understand licensing and copyright law nor do I want to have to understand if my funder’s requirements are at odds with my institution’s requirements of me or indeed my government’s views on what constitutes open. I also really don’t want to have to go through the same thing with my data and my software as well as my journal article. So, in short, yes, I do think that there needs to be simplification. Not wanting to wade into the minefield that is Plan S, I will say that one thing that must be welcome to everyone is that there is now clear coordination going on between different stakeholders. Ideally this would lead to a framework or standard that allows stakeholders to adopt or to sign up to a standardized set of Open Access requirements that are internally consistent and easy to understand...."