Should digital research infrastructure for Open Science be open itself? - Open Science MOOC

Joint post by Jon Tennant, Bianca Kramer, and Tony Ross-Hellauer.

Most modern scholarly research relies to some extent on digital research infrastructures. As the shift toward Open Science takes hold, we should question whether such infrastructures should themselves bespeak open principles (e.g., open data, open standards, and Open Source software). Without these qualities, digital infrastructures potentially pose a unique risk to Open Science. Just as institutions’ historical reliance on a few large publishers for access to the literature has allowed those publishers to dictate the pace of the transition to Open Access, increasing reliance on closed digital infrastructures for research may lead to a new kind of vendor lock-in, but focused on all elements of the research workflow. Such lock-in of data or platforms would compromise the aims of Open Science by limiting the functionality, re-use, and interoperability of such systems, and hence that of the research they enable.