Transition to Open Science | SpringerLink

Abstract:  Many initiatives addressing different types of problems of the practice of science and research have been described or cited in this book. Some were one-issue local actions, some took a broader approach at the national and some at EU level. Some stayed on, others faded after a few years. Many of the issues addressed by these movements and initiatives were part of the system of science and appeared to be systemically interdependent. This is how they converged and precipitated in the movement of Open Science, somewhere at the beginning of the second decade of this century. I discuss the major move that was made since 2015 in the EU to embrace the Open Science practice as the way science and research are being done in Europe. This elicited tensions at first foremost relate to uncertainty regarding scholarly publishing, of how and where we publish open access. But also, with respect to what immediate sharing of data and results in daily practice of researchers means, how we value and give credit for papers and published data sets. It thus poses the question of how, if at all, we must compare incomparable academic work, how we get credit and build reputations in this new open practice of science. It is indeed believed that Open Science with its practice of responsible science will be a major contribution to address the dominant problems in science that we have analysed thus far, or at least will help to mitigate them. Open Science holds a promise to take science to the next phase as outlined in the previous chapters. That is not a romantic naive longing for the science that once was. It will be a truly novel way, but realistic way of doing scientific inquiry according to the pragmatic narrative pointed out.

The Transition to Open Science as can be anticipated from the analyses above will not be trivial. The recent discussions have already shown that the transition to Open Science, even between EU member states, is a very different thing because of specific national, societal and academic contexts.

I will conclude this chapter reporting some of my first-hand experiences, in Brussels and during visits to several EU member states in the course of a Mutual Learning Exercise, but also encounters in North America, South East Asia and South Africa where we in the past years have discussed Open Science. Although we know science and scholarship have many forms and flavours and that wherever you go, there is not one scientific community. For me discussing the Transition to Open Science in the past four years was really a Learning Exercise, an amazing, mostly encouraging, but many times quite shocking, even saddening adventure.