Jisc futures: our ‘painfully slow’ progress towards the goal of open science
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Open science begins with open access
The increasing importance of data and the need for more complex data analytical methods, along with the well-publicised problems in research reproducibility in certain fields, has led to a growing movement for “open science”.
Typically, the full text of a research paper will contain only a subset of the data used to derive the results, and may not specify precisely what software has been used for the analysis or for the simulation. The open science movement seeks to make science more reproducible by adding explicit links in the paper to the full datasets and to any software used. This movement has growing momentum in many countries around the world but here I will focus on the similarities and differences between two of the leading practitioners, the UK and the US.
Open science starts with open access – free access to the full text of research papers funded by government research agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Nasa and the National Institutes of Health in the US, and the Research Councils (soon to be united in UKRI) in the UK.
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The tipping point for open science
In my view, 2013 was the tipping point for the open science movement. In February of that year, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a directive requiring the major federal funding agencies “to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the federal government”.
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Metadata, data management plans and all that
In the UK, the Digital Curation Centre was set up by Jisc and the e-Science Programme in 2004. The original call to establish the DCC described its function as “to provide a national focus for research into curation issues and expertise in the processes of digital archiving, preservation and management. Particular emphasis will be placed on the needs of users of the Centre’s outputs”.
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In the US, the research funding agencies now all have plans to capture research data, assign digital object identifiers (DOIs) to the datasets, and link the data to the relevant research papers. In the UK, again it is the institutional repositories, together with subject data repositories such as the Natural Environment Research Council’s Centre for Environmental Data Analytics, that are taking the lead.
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Onwards to open science
My conclusion is that, in both the UK and US, definite progress is being made towards the goal of open science. However, changing cultures towards the new reality of data-intensive science sometimes seems painfully slow.
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