Transition to Open Science

Frank Miedema PhD,

Professor of Immunology, University Medical Centre Utrecht

Vice-Rector of Research, Utrecht University

A call for action
In May 2016, the Competitiveness Council adopted conclusions on ‘The transition towards an Open Science system’ in which it acknowledges that “Open Science has the potential to increase the quality, impact and benefits of science and to accelerate advancement of knowledge by making it more reliable, more efficient and accurate, better understandable by society and responsive to societal challenges, and has the potential to enable growth and innovation through reuse of scientific results by all stakeholders at all levels of society, and ultimately contribute to growth and competitiveness of Europe.” Open Science encompasses Open Access, Open Research Agenda, Data and Methods, Open Source, Open Educational Resources, Open Evaluation, and Citizen Science. The implementation of Open Science touches upon the social roles and responsibilities of publicly funded research and the organization of the science system. Academic leadership is crucial but national strategies for the implementation of Open Science are essential, including Open Science champions and role models. Open Science is enhancing knowledge markets and improving innovation.

Open Science
The next level of the Social Contract for Science
We saw enormous attention in academia and media, traditional and social, regarding the recent news on ‘Plan S’ of the EU and a coalition of research funders. PlanS is an integral but very critical part of Open Science. PlanS therefore also includes a change of incentives and rewards, thus how we evaluate science and scientists. Indeed, Open Science is about scholarly publishing, sharing data, FAIR data and the European Open Science Cloud. This is opening up science at or near the end of the chain of knowledge production. These changes may seem obvious, but appeared to be difficult to implement, given how scientists get credit.

Why do the public, big national and international public funders, charities and private funders worldwide have high hopes of Open Science as a broad system change? Why is that even if they are aware that Open Science interferes with a major principle of the so-called Social Contract of Science, which makes it hard to implement Open Science? The Contract dates back to the early years after World War Two. The Contract is based on two major premises. The first is that science, can self-regulate autonomously. Science can take the right funding decisions with complete integrity, based on its internal mores and culture. The second premise is that this autonomy is the best guarantee for science producing knowledge, technology and other products for the benefit of society at large.

Critique
This went well until the early 1970s. Gradually in the seventies, policy makers and the public asked for accountability regarding the contribution of science to the grand societal challenges of those days. At the same time science was confronted with high-level fraud and integrity cases that were discussed in Congress and the media. A new contract for science was called for in order to increase societal impact amongst others by organizing more co-creation with stakeholders in society. From the 1990s onwards, it was realized that besides these issues major imperfections (flaws, ‘perverse incentives’ as some would say) had also developed within the governance of science. These imperfections are currently major factors that interfere with principle two: the promise of the contribution of science to society. They directly relate to the incentive and rewards system that has become dominant over time, which is very internally oriented and steers for impact within science more than for societal impact. This means that in the cycle of credibility all actors, deans, department heads, group leaders and PhDs as well as funders and journal editors are each optimizing their interests, which are not in sync with the collective goals of science.
Every year, millions of papers are being published in a still growing number of journals, but most of them are of too poor quality. It is now widely acknowledged that we have a serious reproducibility crisis in at least the biomedical and social sciences.

Analyses and interventions
Even in 2019, this is an important change in the ways of thinking about science in society for many people. It will change the discourse and indicators of quality and excellence, and thus the power structures and resource allocations. Open Science is a new Social Contract for Science in the 21st century that will change the daily practice of our research and will affect all of us in the science community and academia. It is now widely understood that this requires a change in the publishing system as well as the incentive and reward systems, that can only be brought about from the top down. Academic leadership is critical to bring about this transition to implement Open Science, PlanS and the institutional and national adoptions of the DORA principles.

‘What did you do yourself to improve the system that you criticize so badly?’
I have indeed been asked this many times. I have studied the system as a biochemist since 1975, and started writing and talking about it in 1995. I made a career in academia and in a non-profit knowledge driven system with many formal public-private collaborations. I have initiated Science in Transition in The Netherlands as a Dean in Utrecht in 2012 with international impact, driving this analysis and its agenda for action. I have therefore engaged in numerous debate sessions and gave many seminars discussing the insight in Europe as described above, but also in the US, Hongkong, Singapore and South Africa. In my mind, Open Science and Science in Transition naturally merged into the EU Horizon 2020 programme around 2014/2015. I am involved in Open Science programmes in Utrecht University (as leader) and as a member of national platforms. I am an ambassador for PlanS, which was launched by CoalitionS.

Given the analysis described above, I truly believe that the transition to Open Science will be an important step in the right direction. Without this, science will not be able to optimally contribute to the grand challenges, the SDGs, and to 'the good life' in general, and will not fulfil its promise to society.

last revised on 25 February 2020