Why openness benefits research | Heinrich-Hartmann.netHeinrich-Hartmann.net

"The following text is jointly authored by David Shotton (david.shotton@zoo.ox.ac.uk) and Heinrich Hartmann (hartmann@uni-koblenz.de). Cf.  OpenCitations.net - blog. Transparency is essential for trust and credibility in the research community, and true openness brings great opportunities for academia. The internet facilitates the free flow of information and knowledge, and permits new forms of communication both for researchers and for the general public. Already, today’s children can listen freely on the internet to university courses taught by world-leading scientists, and everybody has the best encyclopaedia ever written (Wikipedia) at their fingertips.  These are real game changers. Opening up the research literature is the next logical step ... While the internet enables dissemination of information at a fraction of the cost of traditional print publication, publishing clearly involves more than electronic dissemination.  It is for this reason that we, with others, are presently planning a high level conference on modern scientific communication, entitled Rigor and Openness in 21st Century Science, to be held in Oxford next spring.

However, new publication funding models are being developed, particularly in the United Kingdom, where Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust are insisting that papers reporting research results obtained as a result of their research funding should be published under an open Creative Commons CC-By attribution licence when an article processing charge (APC) is levied, so that the works are freely available for text mining and re-use [1].  What is significant is that they are backing their words with funding to enable it.  Cameron Neylon has recently written a commentary in Nature about the importance of this [2].  Furthermore, peer review is being carefully examined by several forward-looking publishers to determine how well open alternatives to the present system of confidential review actually work... New forms of academic social media can play a role here, to catalyse interactions between geographically separated academics, and many experiments in this area are being conducted.  Academic social media can also play an important role in filtering the wealth of new articles published every day, and in alerting people to the small fraction of these that are most relevant to them.  Typically, junior researchers rely on recommendations from friends and colleagues about which articles are worth reading, but if academic social media can be used to broaden this recommendation network, they will provide a significant service.  Of course researchers, particularly early in their careers, are cautious about sharing their discoveries too early or too widely, for fear they may get ‘scooped’ ... An example of a researcher who practices openness in his day-to-day research is Georgio Gilestro, Lecturer in Systems Neurobiology with the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, who publishes his research group’s Open Lab Book online.  Our personal experience, not at least in the joint Open Citations and Related Work developments described in the next blog post, is that you gain more than you loose by being open! ..."