The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)’s guidance to open the results of federally funded scientific research represents great progress and will provide the necessary impetus to nudge the research and publication systems toward more open data and access. At the same time, it is important to recognize this is just a first step. Going forward, OSTP should extend this initiative toward a next-generation open science, working with European, multilateral, and global actors to deliver across the following five areas.

First, it should broaden the initiative beyond the end stage of the research cycle (i.e., publication), and instead advance open science at various stages – including the opening and clustering of research questions posed by applicants seeking government funding, regardless of the success of their applications.

Second, it should approach open science from a ‘cultural change’ perspective, by, for example, initiating efforts to transform research culture through the ‘naming and faming’ of best practices. Steps could include the award of an annual prize, in the form of substantial research funding, to open data stewards who have most advanced the cause of open science.

Third, it should connect major open data repositories in a distributed, discoverable way, helping to overcome the current fragmentation across data repositories. One model for this could be the EU’s open science cloud.

Fourth, it should foster more links between the open research data communities and those working on open data across government and the private sector. These communities rarely interact today, and open data efforts would be strengthened by greater collaboration.

And fifth, it should grow investment in research on the value proposition of open science, so that key actors can make more informed decisions on the impact of open data and open science. Ultimately, we may require a new Science of Open Science.

Let me reiterate the positive nature of the current action, and our hopes that this represents just the start of a journey. We need, in effect, to keep innovating how we practice open science, so that the commitment to openness extends throughout the research lifecycle and the way in which science is conducted and disseminated.

Biography

Dr. Stefaan G. Verhulst is Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer as well as Director of GovLab's Data Program.

He is also, among other positions and affiliations, the Editor-in-Chief of Data & Policy, an open-access journal by Cambridge University Press; the research director of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance; Chair of the Data for Children Collaborative with Unicef; and a member of the High-Level Expert Group to the European Commission on Business-to-Government Data Sharing.

He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), Yale University, Central European University and serves on numerous (advisory) boards, including Sparks and Honey, Center for Media, Data and Society, among others. He is also Founder and Curator in Chief of The Living Library.

In 2018 he was recognized as one of the 10 Most Influential Academics in Digital Government globally (as part of the Top 100 in Digital Government) by the global policy platform Apolitical.