I quite liked this webinar and it addressed a few points of open science that I hadn’t thought about much before. The recording is now on YouTube, but I thought I’d also post some notes on what I thought were the key points.
Two-word Summary: Epistemic (in)justice
This comment by the UNESCO host got to the heart of what that means at the moment:
The public must have the right to receive opportune, accurate and factual information on the developments of COVID-19 and its threats to their lives. The proactive publication of data and information relevant to the pandemic supports and protects the public from disinformation and the disease itself.
The UNESCO advisory committee on Open Science has proposed the core values of: collective benefits, equity and fairness, quality and integrity, diversity, and inclusiveness.
On several occasions, Jean-Claude Guédon brought up the point that while open access was important for open science, it wasn’t sufficient for epistemic justice. This also requires more global equality in the opportunities to practice science and publish scientific articles, and that this starts with having equality in setting the goals and priorities of research programs I.e. ideally people from a developing country should be setting the priorities for research that is done for their country’s benefit, rather than having them set by foreign funders and universities. (I suspect that [percieved?] differences in expertise and ethics often makes this hard to realize in practice.)
The above point was elaborated on by Samia Kaddor from the Tunisian government, who pointed out that international collaborations Tunisia had participated intended to focus on addressing Western issues in a Western/Northern context. She viewed the most successful research for Tunisia’s response to COVID as having been done by funding local researchers to find local solutions. (This makes me wonder if there are any collaboration between Southern countries do more successful research by focusing on regional problems and solutions)
Rob Terry from the WHO TDR said that they viewed open science as being important for the input, output and impact of research, as shown in this diagram:
In response to a question about the importance of pre-prints for COVID research, Rob Terry replied:
Pre-prints have a role to share early results between mainly between experts - the same researchers that are the peer reviewers in published papers. Many pre-prints are now able to go one and become traditional papers - in some cases on the same platform e.g. F1000. However, for guidelines and technical guidance the key is the aggregation of many studies (systematic reviews) which have been peer reviewed and an assessment of their quality e.g. GRADE in order to form evidence based policy. So pre-prints are timely and needed but require the reader to interpret the quality. NB the hydroxychloroquine peer reviewed papers in Lancet and NEJM would have been unlikely to go further if they had been published first as pre-prints.
Latin American is considered to have the best Open Science environment in the world, with infrastructure like Scilo and many non-profit publishers (indexed on Redalyc). Indeed, the post-war/1960’s Western publication system led by national scientific agencies was viewed much more favourably than the current system led by commercial publishers, and Latin America was commended for having its current system retain many of the merits of the old Western one. (This was somewhat surprising to me, I live in Brazil and know a few researchers in Sao Pãulo - they mostly seem to try to publish in American or European journals)
Glenn Hampson from the Open Scholarship Initiative had this excellent slide about an Open Renaissance. Interestingly, although his organization has a clear view of current problems and grand vision for the future, he explained that they were very focused on working towards that by pursuing goals that were realizable within 10 years (their Plan A). This appeared to be in contrast to the approach used by Coalition S, which seems to advocate for a larger scale systemic change toward Open Science.
Recurring themes
-
Quite a bit of progress has been made on open-access in the last 20 years. All new journals are OA, and subscription-based journals are viewed as being in decline (or adapting to OA). More broadly, journals are now basically an artefact of printing and re-evaluation of the entire publication system can be done for open science in the digital age.
-
Open access is important but won’t solve everything. Not all open science is reliable and high integrity, and likewise, not all reliable and high integrity science is open. Work should focus on promoting the intersection of these areas, and better assessment of the quality individual research items is the next hurdle.
-
Following on from the above point the assessment of research output needs to move away from journal metrics (i.e. impact factor) and focus on the value of individual publications. This doesn’t need to be based on peer review or defined by where it is published (top-down assessment), something can be published and then evaluated by the community before value is assigned (bottom-up assessment). Interestingly, there was a general consensus on the need for the qualitative assessment of research value, not just the need for different, but still quantitative, article-level metrics.
-
The current publication system encourages competition between researchers for scarce resources (i.e. space in top-tier journals. Also, grants). Open science should move forward to encourage sharing and collaboration. There is also the need for inclusiveness, diversity, and a global/international context. The later can be hard as scientific funding agencies are usually nationally constrained.
-
Creating better open science platforms and infrastructure are important and should be considered a public good. As an example, Rob Terry said that a platform that could link across research projects (at all their stages) and across languages could provide real value for the WHO.