Open research is a means, not an end - Research Professional News

"Open science, or, as I prefer to call it, open research, has become a bit of an obsession in higher education. We have concordats, initiatives, mandates, statements and plans. Most of these recognise that the biggest barrier to achieving open practices is the current research evaluation regime. ...

The answer, for many, seems to be to change what we measure. If we value openness, we should start measuring openness, right? 

Such measures are starting to be used. Open access publication is increasingly linked to university funding, for example in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF). The Leiden University Ranking now compares institutions’ engagement with open access. The European Commission has measured the proportion of open access publications from leading research nations worldwide. 

However, there is a lot more to open research than open access. And beyond the cascade effects of high-level policy onto individuals, scholars currently have no real incentive to give up one way of working and engage with another. 

One or two have tried to change this. There is the Open Science Career Assessment Matrix, but I know of no adopters. The odd university has expressed a desire to value open science activity in its promotion criteria.   

Such efforts seem logical. But we have to be careful not to fall back into the trap of valuing a research output’s vehicle—this time a journal’s openness, not its citedness—rather than its quality. 

Is openness really what we value most about research? Or is openness a means to achieving something else? ..."