Our Story
Open Research: taking the secrecy out of science
Imagine being months, or years, into a research project, only to see another researcher publish the results of an identical study.
Being “scooped”, as researchers call it, makes it very difficult to publish their results, despite the importance of replication. But the real problem is that the results from the scooped study will probably never see the light of day - meaning those results will not contribute to the advancement of knowledge. For government agencies and other organizations that fund research, it becomes an inefficient use of money – money that’s increasingly hard to come by.
The closed, almost secretive nature of scientific research in many countries means that wasteful duplication and even triplication of projects can occur, so the money available pays for less research. In medicine, for example, this means it may take longer to develop new medicines, and treatments to cure disease.
Even when research is completed, the way scientific results are traditionally shared makes it difficult and expensive for scientists to discover what has been done. As Michael Eisen said in a recent talk on scholarly publishing “Every year universities, governments and other organizations spend in excess of $10 billion dollars to buy back access to papers their researchers gave to journals for free.”
Enter Mat Todd and Alex Holcombe from Australia; Fabiana Kubke, Nick Jones, Alison Stringer and Leonie Hayes from New Zealand; and Cameron Neylon from the UK: the professionals behind New Zealand-Australia Open Research (NZAU Open Research).
In a nutshell, NZAU Open Research aims to make publicly funded research freely available. After all, we paid for it!
In practice, this means making the aims, progress, methods and results of publicly-funded research public as early as possible, and putting policies and systems in place to make sure that happens.
Open Research will reduce unnecessary duplication: so instead of three teams trying to solve the same problem three times without learning from each others work, they could each be trying to solve a different problem once, and even share resources while doing so.
- Open Research will increase collaboration: by making it easy for researchers to know when someone is proposing or working on something with similar aims.
- Open Research will reduce cost: by making research aims, progress and findings available between scientists and institutions, rather than solely through publishers.
- Open Research will maximise the benefit of research funding by allowing researchers to re-use all the data generated by others.
In short, Open Research will deliver more science for the dollars invested.
According to NZAU Open Research cofounder Fabiana Kubke, success will need a change in mindset. “Open Research puts the advancement of science ahead of the advancement of individual scientific careers.” While she admits this will be a challenge, she’s convinced the benefits are there. “Cost-benefit analysis mainly from Europe show that there is a cost gain by moving to Open Access“. To make open research work, the way researchers are recognised and promoted needs to change as well.
NZAUOR kicked off in 2012 and is gathering momentum. In March 2013 a group of researchers, librarians, software developers and lawyers from Australia and New Zealand, USA and Europe gathered for the first New Zealand-Australia Open Research conference. On the final day, they drafted the Tasman Declaration, outlining the group’s vision for Open Research in both countries. The Tasman Declaration is now live (and supporters can sign up here). This year will see NZAUOR members training other researchers in open research methods, and engaging with funding groups to convince them of the value of taking an open research approach.