Breaking News: Open Science Is Now On (Y)Our Agenda

Wouter Schallier
Chief Librarian at the Hernán Santa Cruz Library of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Santiago de Chile
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECLAC/United Nations

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science is a major step forward in recognizing the importance of open science for science and society. While the concept of open science and the contribution that it makes may be known to most of us, this is not necessarily the case for all citizens. Our hope is that the UNESCO Recommendation will finally break the news on open science.

Open science should indeed be breaking news. Open science saves lives. Thanks to data sharing and global collaboration on a scale never seen before in human history, the development of the COVID-19 vaccines took only one year instead of the usual 5–10 years. Speeding up scientific discovery by rethinking the traditional mechanisms for communicating scientific advances: this is what open science is about. Scholarly communication can and must be wider, faster, more inclusive, and more collaborative. Open science is innovation. Open science is better science.

However, there will be no innovation in scholarly communication without diversity and inclusion. One of the main contributions of the UNESCO Recommendation is that it points at open science as the road towards more diverse and inclusive scholarly communication. Researchers who produce quality research should get the same opportunities and visibility, independently of which country or institution they are from. Hence, there is also the importance of multilingualism; there is no reason why quality science cannot be communicated in languages other than English.

For more than two decades, free and open access to scientific journals has been at the centre of our attention. Regions such as Latin America have a long tradition of open access. However, we urgently need to go further and put policies, mechanisms, and infrastructures in place on an institutional, national, and regional level, to share all types of scientific output, especially research data, in a trustworthy and secure environment. Open science is not just open access on steroids, it's a paradigm shift; it's a change of mind. Research institutions must prepare for this, or they risk losing control (again) over their main intellectual assets.

Today, at the end of 2021, the internet is more than 30 years old. It has been a powerful platform for democratization of information. Still, we have not been able to solve one of the main threats to democracy: the fact that sensational, unreliable, and false information has more visibility on the internet than does quality scientific information. Therefore, equal and open access to quality information for all, and indeed open science, should be our joint commitment. The UNESCO Recommendation puts open science on the global agenda and paves the way for its local and regional implementation.

If we do not want to leave anyone behind, as we committed to in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, open science is a must.

So how do we move forward? National and regional funding agencies have the power to trigger open science. International research projects involving partners from the Global North and the Global South as equals will help to spread open science practices. On an institutional level, research institutions need to develop and implement strategies for managing research data.