UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science – thoughts by Robert-Jan Smits

Robert-Jan Smits
President of Eindhoven University of Technology

With 193 member states signing on to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, six years after the Amsterdam Call for Action, open science is again high on the agenda of science policy makers—this time on a global scale. This is a very positive development given the enormous challenges our planet is facing. Only by sharing knowledge beyond borders will we be able to address these challenges and find solutions.

 It’s particularly important that the Recommendation stresses open access for both scientific publications and data. Each year, taxpayers worldwide contribute over $2 trillion USD towards research and development—for new vaccines, for example, but also to further knowledge of climate change, public health, economies, poverty, and other global inequalities. Public funds contribute to the publication of around 2.5 million scholarly articles per year; yet most of us have access to just a fraction of that output.

 In fact, it is estimated that at least two thirds of the world’s publicly funded research, and an even larger fraction of the world’s total research content, is hidden behind paywalls. These paywalls are blocking millions of people from accessing the information they want or need, and the problem goes far beyond late night Googling: restricting access to research limits education, slows down medical discoveries, and even widens the inequality gap between the global North and South.

 Campaigners have been pushing for open access—meaning free and unconditional access to online knowledge—for decades, but with limited success. According to the prevalent theory, if the academic publishing system was flipped on its head and paid for at the source rather than by the end user (the reader), the system would be fairer and research would be more widely disseminated. While this new system is certainly possible, it requires support from publishers—including the biggest, multi-million-dollar businesses. 

 On 4 September 2018, a bold new initiative called Plan S was unveiled, kickstarting a world-wide shift in attitude towards open-access research. For the first time, funding agencies across continents joined forces to impose new rules for research publication, with the aim that one day all research would be free and openly accessible to everyone.

 If the global COVID-19 crisis has taught us anything, it’s that access to information is king. We are slowly emerging from a pandemic that has directly claimed more than 5.6 million lives and has affected many more. When the pandemic hit, many academic publishers did the responsible thing and removed paywalls for COVID-related research, meaning anyone in the world could read and learn from experts in the field. Researchers around the globe quickly began work on a vaccine, enabled by the open, free sharing of the COVID-19 genome by scientists in China. Such sharing allowed the problem to be tackled collectively, and at a rapid pace, by thousands of international colleagues.

 If we can do this for COVID-19, why not for climate change, rare diseases, the energy transition, migration, poverty, and social injustice? The COVID-19 crisis showed that it is possible to make research open, but more than this, the pandemic shattered the illusion that traditional publishing can continue the way it has for centuries. How can we ever go back to the way we worked previously, now that open access has been proven successful?

 Sadly, we already are. Paywalls are gradually creeping back up, and there is still a resistance to change among some of the bigger players. But there is a sea change in public opinion, and in the attitudes of academics and universities. Transformative read-and-publish deals between libraries and publishers are also a turning point, with most publishers now gradually committing to transition their journals towards full open access over the coming years.

 Plan S was intended to be a stone thrown into the water: the initiative helped to accelerate the number of transformative agreements occurring, and it also incentivised the creation of new publishing platforms in the open-access domain. But, above all, Plan S forced big commercial publishers to rethink their business models—some for the first time—and sparked a debate about the future of academic publishing that would make it impossible for the system to stay broken.

 Ultimately, it will be up to science policy makers, funders, and the wider academic community to monitor the transition towards open access and to make the sharing of knowledge beyond borders the new normal. If we have any hope of solving some of the biggest challenges facing the planet, it is crucial that we do so.