As is the case for nearly all complex systems, changing a process is going to be not only difficult, take a long time but also meet a "chicken & egg" problem (causality dilemma). The goal of science is to create and disseminate knowledge. At least for publicly funded research projects, the deliverables should be publicly available. In the past decade, much progress has been made to reach #openscience, including moving from a closed journals to an "open-access" model (whether it actually reduced the financial burden on organizations is another matter entirely).
In the case of the open science reform, the "chicken & egg" problem asks whether researchers should practice open science first, or should the research ecosystem adopt open science first?
1) With strict resource constraints (time, funding, workforce), researchers don't have time to dedicate to deliverables that don't provide a direct value. The values of open science are laudable, but they are not rewarded. Why would researchers spend time creating and sharing a FAIR dataset when publishing another paper with that time is preferable for career advancement?
2) If the research ecosystem adopts open science (one way or another), e.g., researchers MUST publish code, data, register protocols, etc., then there is a huge non-adoption risk, or even worse a malicious compliance risk. A highly valued right for researchers is their academic freedom. In some ways, project-based funding is already threatening academic freedom, then what would it look like if grant agencies started withholding further funding because they didn't publish X or Y dataset?
In an era and a society where work is often meaningless or people are not convinced by their company's values and purposes, research is probably one of the remaining job where the work is driven by the person themselves. For that reason, the culture is very strong and/or opinionated because people actually like their jobs.
Hidden in the problem above is the interdependency between culture, trust and research reforms. Jonny Coates points many issues in a thoughtful piece [1], including that researchers MUST be at the center of the system reform: "Many reform initiatives are designed for researchers, but not often with them. If open science, assessment reform, and research culture initiatives are to succeed, active researchers need to be more than subjects. They need to be participants in designing the systems they are expected to use.".
[1] https://upstream.force11.org/connecting-reform-movements-linking-research-culture-trust-and-open-research-publishing/
#OpenScience #CoARA #ReformingRA
Jan R. Boehnke
Helmholtz Open Science Office
OpenAIRE
Serhii Nazarovets
Open Sci Monitoring Initiative
Felix Schönbrodt
Jocelyn
Ellen Euler ✅
Pascal Quach