Tasman Declaration

Published: 28 March 2013

Research outputs should be open to increase benefits of research investments

During 6-8 February 2013, several dozen citizens from different sectors of Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK came together for the inaugural New Zealand Australia Open Research Conference. The group included researchers, lawyers, librarians, research infrastructure providers, technology consultants, and software developers.

New Zealand and Australia are among those nations pioneering open approaches across the public sector and in some aspects of research. The Tasman Declaration recommends key actions through which New Zealand and Australia can coordinate and advance their respective open approaches to research towards greater economic, societal, and environmental impact.

Tasman Declaration

Publicly funded research should be openly available to maximise return on investments into research, and to increase participation in research and its translation beyond the traditional research sector.

"Open Research" is about removing barriers for society to benefit from research, by ensuring open access to and reuse of research papers, data, materials, metadata and code, and by developing the supporting practices and policies.

In the absence of a good reason, research outputs should be made available with as few restrictions as possible and as soon as possible.

Vision

Society is able to access and reuse the outputs of publicly funded research for economic, societal, and environmental benefit.

Benefits of Open Research

Open research is more transparent, accessible, efficient and reproducible.

Open Research will:

• Open up the processes and practices of research
• Enable public involvement in the entire research process
• Give society better returns for the money invested in research
• Facilitate research translation thereby increasing societal, economic, and environmental impact
• Accelerate discovery by allowing timely and efficient feedback and quality control of the entire research process

Recommendations

1) Policy Mandates support and prioritise Open Research

2) Infrastructure and Capability enable Open Research

3) Research Practice and Measurement encourage and reward Open Research

We recommend that Australian and New Zealand research communities, institutions, policy makers, and funders carry out the following actions:

1) Policy Mandates

• Australian and New Zealand governments should build Open Research into research and innovation policy, particularly for the investment of public funds
• New Zealand and Australia should coordinate actions and share knowledge on policies and actions for Open Research

2) Infrastructure and Capability

• Governments and institutions should coordinate actions to ensure that their technical and social research infrastructure supports Open Research policies and practices
• Institutions and researchers should enable and encourage access to, mining of, and reuse of any and all research outputs, with as few restrictions as possible and as soon as possible
• Roles and responsibilities of communities, institutions and government for the curation and re-use of research outputs should be clearly articulated.

3) Research Practice and Measurement

• Government and institutions should expand the measures for research performance to incorporate Open Research practices
• Institutions and communities should foster research collaboration to exploit Open Research

Conclusion

Doing research in the open brings research into alignment with worldwide changes in government and business, where open innovation has enabled people to achieve more together than they ever could alone.