A Strategic Aproach to the Open Agenda

By Malcolm Read, JISC Executive Secretary, United Kingdom

The sharing of research openly for the benefit of society and industry has long been an essential part of the ethos of research and education. The outcomes of public funded research are usually made freely available for the benefit of society and industry; and the sharing of knowledge and experience underpins scientific endeavour. Similarly the open transfer of knowledge and tools benefits much of the ICT infrastructure essential to researchers. The Internet and World Wide Web are both infrastructure examples of the value of openness.
Open Access to the outputs of public funded research in the form of scholarly papers, articles and monographs is hard to argue against and greatly improves the effectiveness of knowledge transfer. The World Wide Web provides the platform for open access to such resources but in practice the peer review process (which is essential) is carried out by publishers who obviously rely on sales of their journals to remain as viable businesses. As a consequence access to the outputs of research is restricted to those with ready access to libraries that can afford to subscribe to relevant journals. Even the wealthiest universities cannot afford to provide all journals. The transfer of scientific knowledge is therefore very imperfect, particularly to less wealthy institutions such as universities in the developing world. The same lack of access faces students in smaller higher educational institutions and the public at large. And this last community is of growing importance as the proportion of the population enjoying the advantages of higher education increases; on leaving university they are suddenly denied ready access to a wealth of scholarly and academic material. Although impossible to quantify the currently restricted access to the output of
research hampers innovation and development in both developed and, especially, developing countries. One of the most effective ways of promoting open access is through repositories, whether discipline based or owned by a university or research institute. However deposit of papers, and it must be the full text, is considered by most researchers to be a burden providing little return in terms of career progression. They may be mistaken in holding this view as wider availability leads to wider readership and higher citation rates: this will lead to greater recognition and reward. The employing institution also reaps the benefits of greater recognition of the outputs of their research staff if their repository holds the text of papers and articles written by their staff. For these reasons the deposit of papers produced by staff in institutional repositories (and discipline repositories where required by
research funding bodies) should be mandated, and enforced, and thus become part of recognised good practice in the research process. Open educational resources represent a significant movement in higher education. A large number of universities now make available course material and there are international organisations dedicated to making these materials available in an organised way. The benefits to students and informal learners are obvious and there are real opportunities for teachers and lecturers to make use of those resources and reduce time spent on preparing their course material. There is also an increasing amount of open educational material available in other educational sectors. The real need here is to contextualise the material in pedagogically useful ways. Clearing third party property rights is a big issue but this will ease a new material is prepared within a digital open environment. The need to curate and preserve research data has also stimulated debate and consideration of the benefits of making research data more widely available within an open context where this makes sense. Clearly much research data will not be made openly available due to ethical, security and commercial considerations. In some disciplines such as environmental and the social sciences long term curation is common and the opportunity in other disciplines, particularly the biosciences partly stimulated by genome sequencing, is being seriously explored
in many countries. It is expensive to curate data and much work remains to be done to identify which data has the potential for re-use. And again it is not part of normal research best practice to describe and curate data in all disciplines. Yet the benefits are enormous: one day a “data review” will be as common as a literature review before conducting a new research project.
Open source software is widely used by researchers, and is often developed by them. This can lead to commercial products and frequently benefits the research process by leading to open standards. The recent growth in e-science processes and applications has been largely based on open source software and has been responsible for many developments in such software. The advantages are choice, flexibility and cost, but against this must be offset the costs of software development, often done by the researchers themselves, and the difficulty in identifying generic software solutions due to the multiplicity of choice and the, often strong, passions and sense of ownership that can be created around particular software platforms. Adequate investment is seldom available to make open source software robust and reliable until a significant user base exists, when opportunities for the private sector become available through the provision of support services and new applications. There is a need to develop a suitable professional and career path for software developers supporting the research process; this will lead to better software and free up researchers to do their research. A greater professionalism in the open source software environment has the opportunity to benefit research through greater efficiency and create a sounder foundation for commercial development based around open standards.
Finally Web 2.0 technologies are stimulating Open Research where collaboration during the research process can take place, and whether it will have long term significant impact. Examples are the use of community generated and owned resources (known as “community source”), informal publishing by the general public, software to create data banks of community experience and solutions (“crowd sourcing”), and share public involvement in large scale computing problems such as the search for extra-intelligent life. It remains to be seen how widespread this will become but it presents an exciting new development in the open world.