Equity, transparency, and accountability: open science for the 21st century - ScienceDirect

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science  depicts a world where all science is available, accessible, and usable in all languages, by all who need it; where all actors are transparent about the people and processes used in generating and communicating knowledge; and where knowledge generation, access, and use in academia is not hampered by inequalities or issues of inappropriate credit. Achieving this ideal is a huge task. Here we focus primarily on open research because if research is not open, the rest of the vision set out in the UNESCO Recommendation cannot be achieved.

Scientific knowledge in recent centuries has been defined by, and has emanated from, high-income countries (HICs). The world's oldest scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was first published in England in 1665, by and for men of European origin,  a tradition followed by The Lancet when it was launched in 1823. As the number of scientific journals increased after World War 2, the expectations of authorship, descriptions of methods, presentation of data, and extent of reference citation changed. These changes were driven not only by growth in science but also by the profitability of scholarly publishing for large publishing companies and scholarly societies.  By the last decades of the 20th century many libraries found they could not pay for the ever-increasing numbers of journals published at premium prices. Simultaneously, the citation impact factor (IF) commodified journal prestige as the route to academic funding and success.  The resulting perverse incentives to publish in journals with a high IF contributed to many of the problems of reproducibility and trust  that now plague academic publishing.