Open Science

While many scientific publications are closed – you have to pay for subscriptions in order to see the research published within them – the research published in open access journals can be read by all (scientists and nonscientists alike). Open access journals have gained popularity as the internet has grown because it is easy to host the research papers published within them on the web. This alleviates the need to pay for printing and distributing the physical journal.

Open access journal articles are available to anyone who wants to read them. Open access journals are particularly valuable to:

• Small Schools and Small Businesses – Subscriptions to closed publications are prohibitively expensive (thousands of dollars per year for a single journal in some cases) and smaller institutions (including Addgene, the nonprofit that I work for) have great difficulty paying for access to important publications. Open access makes it easier for these institutions to access research results and put these results to good use. These results help future researchers do more productive work and could help small businesses develop more useful products and technologies.
• Developing Countries – People working in developing countries could be the most highly affected by the latest research (think malaria research) and are potentially in the best position to know the most appropriate next steps. However, researchers in these countries, like those in small schools and businesses, often find difficult to pay high subscription costs. Open access journals put the latest research in their grasp.
• The General Public – Say you have a relative who suffers from a rare disease and you’ve taken it upon yourself to learn as much as you can about that disease. It’s likely that you’ll have difficulty accessing all the research on that disease because much of it will be in closed access journals. Open access journals make research (even if not easily understood) within the reach of all concerned parties, whether they do research or not. Without even getting to this more personal side of the debate, it’s often argued that research should be available to the public given that much of it is publicly funded.

• Increased citations – Scientists partially judge the value of their published research by how often that research is cited in other publications. Many studies have shown that open access articles are more highly cited than closed access articles (reviewed here).
• Improved ability to find information – There are literally millions of research articles published every year. Not all closed access journals can be indexed by academic search engines like Google Scholar. This can make it difficult to find small pieces of information contained within those articles. Open access articles are readily available for indexing by search engines.
• Reusability of images – This one is particularly important for me. When writing about recently published research, oftentimes the images in the original publication are fantastic at helping explain the results. However, you often have to pay to use images from closed-access journals. Open access images just need to be attributed appropriately.

Downsides:

There are, of course, some downsides to Open Access and many of them stem from paying for publication. Because open access publishers don’t get subscription fees, one of the ways they make money is by having authors pay to publish. This presents an inherent conflict of interest for open access publishers; there’s the potential for low quality work to be published simply because the authors pay for it. Indeed, so-called predatory journals that do not have proper review but do accept publications and their associated fees exist. Of course, there is policing for this within the academic community and it is not an unsolvable problem. For instance, publishing reviews along with final articles (as some journals are already doing) shows potential authors that a publication carries out rigorous review. Finally, the need to pay for publication may also prevent poorly funded labs from publishing at all.

Beyond open access publications themselves, many within the open science movement also push for open data and reagent sharing. Open data essentially means that, any data that is used to create published analyses is made available for anyone to use and analyze on their own. Reagent sharing means that any materials constructed during the research process (particular DNA sequences, cell lines, or bacterial strains for instance) are made available for future researchers to use or re-test themselves. Proponents hope that open data and reagent sharing will make it easier to reproduce research results between labs, prevent researchers from recreating reagents unnecessarily, and accelerate future discovery.

In its purest form, open science also calls for results to be made available for review as they are obtained. This can be accomplished through online lab notebooks where researchers record their experiments as they’re doing them. This seems unlikely in the near term given that many scientists worry about their ideas and work being stolen – particularly by larger and better funded labs that could potentially take ideas that show early success and run with them. Nonetheless, this is a fantastic goal to aim for, and the less pessimistic viewpoint (my own view point :D) says that it could lead to greater collaboration that accelerates science.