Open Science Festival - Rotterdam

At the end of August Omix took another trip to Europe, this time to attend the Open Science Festival held in Rotterdam at the Erasmus University. We have friends and collaborators in the Netherlands, so it was a great opportunity to catch up.

Rotterdam is only a train ride away from the Midlands. It’s a sprawling modern metropolis, with leafy suburbs and waterways, and an excellent infrastructure for cycling and public transport.

Omix first became aware of the Open Science Festival through Ascenscia’s Ahmed and Lirry whom I met at the Future Labs Live meeting in Basel. I was intrigued - while I had heard of Open Science, the cultural shift that it represents has not taken a substantial foothold yet in the UK. The team wanted to know what the fuss was about - and how the Dutch were getting on with it.

Open Science is broadly defined as making scientific research accessible to anyone. This means making samples, data, publications and software freely available to both professionals and the general public. It encompasses practices and initiatives like publishing in pre-print journals, Open Access publishing, implementing FAIR data principles and collaborative approaches to Scientific endeavours. More recently, it has also started including other scholarly disciplines, such as the Arts and Humanities. The idea of Open Science being that by freely sharing research, data, and ideas, we will accelerate discoveries, produce higher quality data and help society as a whole benefit from publicly-funded research endeavours.

It’s big picture stuff.

Anyone familiar with academic culture will know that to achieve this, a big culture-shift is required to get to this utopian vision: Careers in science are built on publishing articles in peer-reviewed top-ranked, ‘prestigious’ journals. Just through association with a journal’s brand, an article immediately gains, for want of a better word ‘kudos’. These journals attract the risky, ground-breaking research that grabs headlines and demonstrates ‘Impact’. But by virtue of publishing ‘risky’ research, there is also a higher rate of retractions and the potential for propagation of bias in research. Good research practice makes raw data and code available alongside research, or on request. However, most ‘prestigious’ journals have long histories and trade on the basis of their brand name, putting valuable data and publications behind a paywall, or in the case of Open Access, require the author to pay the publisher a fixed fee to make the article and data freely available.

A union of European Research Agencies and Funders recently launched Plan S, which mandates the publication of all research as Open Access, without an embargo. Opposition naturally emerged from many corners, with a conflict slowly playing out between the data producers (that is the researchers and funders) and the publishers. It is ongoing, but the direction of travel seems irreversible now - towards a more open way of conducting and disseminating science.

Making publications openly accessible is only one aspect of Open Science though. And I attended several talks and workshops that were developing initiatives and ideas that seek to create the social infrastructure needed to support an Open Science future. A few highlights were:

• Community peer review of pre-print articles.

• Community-led publication of data.

• Promoting Open Science practice through Recognition and Rewards.

It was clear that this is not a trivial undertaking.

Altering the behaviour of the scholarly industry will require both the carrot and the stick approach, with strong leadership coming from the top as well as from the community. The Dutch appear ahead of the curve here, with some of their Universities now hiring on criteria that don’t include publication ‘impact’, instead assessing and rewarding ‘soft’ skills like collaborative behaviours and adoption of principles of Open Science.

Omix will continue to watch this experiment with great interest. As if it does prove successful in its aims of accelerating discovery and delivering a fairer, more open research culture - it will be a model that others will follow.

For our part, at Omix - we will align our practices, where we can, with Open Science principles while respecting our commercial agreements.

We fully intend to be a part of this brighter future when it does arrive.