An editorial and a commentary in Nature advocate open science communication
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0170
The 28 June Nature engages the evolution of scientific publishing and communication. “Openness costs,” says the headline on an editorial . “Two reports highlight key aspects of the global trend towards open access to research results: Who will pay, and how much, to supply what to whom?” The headline on a commentary says, “Open your minds and share your results: An open approach is the best way to maximize the benefits of research for both scientists and the public.”
One of the two recent UK reports under discussion is “Report of the working group on expanding access to published research findings ,” known as the Finch report. It describes “how access could be enhanced,” says Nature‘s editorial, “and how policy-makers could promote a gradual shift towards publishing research papers in journals that allow or require authors to pay article publishing charges (APCs) up front.” That would make each “published paper . . . freely available to all from the moment of publication,” the editors note. It’s “a shift that Nature in principle supports,” they say.
The other recent report is the Royal Society’s “Science as an open enterprise .” It says of itself that it “highlights the need to grapple with the huge deluge of data created by modern technologies in order to preserve the principle of openness and to exploit data in ways that have the potential to create a second open science revolution.” The report’s opening adds, “Exploring massive amounts of data using modern digital technologies has enormous potential for science and its application in public policy and business. The report maps out the changes that are required by scientists, their institutions and those that fund and support science if this potential is to be realised.”
Nature‘s editors see “striking” parallels between the two reports: “Both make the point that scientific output, whether research papers or research data, needs to be rendered usable, and that the costs of curation, hosting, editing and enrichment with metadata, and the continual renewal of such activities, must all be met.”
Later the editors reiterate their awareness of the value that publishers add:Publishers . . . will need all the more to demonstrate that they add value to the research process. This sits alongside their need to deliver a reasonable profit—whether to fund learned-society activities or to reduce their publishing charges (the aim of the Public Library of Science) or, like many suppliers of services and equipment to researchers, to deliver a return to their investors. The perception of publishers as profiteers is strong, and understanding of the value they add is weak. Not noted for their transparency, publishers will have to work hard to develop trust amid a fundamental shift in their customer base.
Open enquiry has been at the heart of science since the first scientific journals were printed in the seventeenth century. Publication of scientific theories—and the supporting experimental and observational data—permits others to identify errors, to reject or refine theories and to reuse data. Science’s capacity for self-correction comes from this openness to scrutiny and challenge.
Modern techniques to gather, store and manipulate data make this more difficult. In the 1980s, I published a paper that presented seven hard-won data points showing the relationship between stress and velocity beneath a glacier. Two years ago, I was involved in an analogous experiment on the Antarctic ice sheet that created more than a billion times more data points. No journal could publish these data, so for them to be accessible, the only option was to deposit the information in a recognized repository, complete with metadata (data about data), and to signpost it in published papers, preferably through live links in the papers’ electronic versions.
Boulton also worries that “there is strong evidence that the partial reporting of the results of clinical trials, skewed towards those with positive outcomes, obscures relationships between cause and effect.” This means, he says, that “We should publish all the data, and we should explore them not just for preconceived relationships, but also for unexpected ones.” He continues:
Without rigorous use and manipulation of data, science merely creates myths. At the same time, communications technologies are displacing the printed page from its dominant role as the medium of scientific communication. This is already exploiting the collective intelligence of the scientific community and shifting the social dynamic of research towards collaboration.
This shift has not been mandated by research councils, governments or national academies, but is the consequence of scientists finding more productive and creative ways to do science. Pathfinder disciplines include bioinformatics, astronomy, mathematics, nanotechnology and social and health statistics.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.