Open science, in particular the open access publishing of research and the widespread sharing of data, have been depicted as key to combatting the COVID-19 pandemic – not least in the unprecedented speed with which vaccines were developed. However, there is little empirical evidence to back those assertions.

With a new study titled “Open Science – Crucial for effective COVID research?” I sought to explore whether, and to what extent, open science practices influenced the speed of COVID research. I ran a literature review, surveyed more than 200 COVID researchers, and held qualitative interviews with six scientists.

The human rights case can be made for Open Science – this has been made clear by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in its General Comment No. 25 on science and economic, social, and cultural rights. In this this much-awaited interpretation of the so-called right to science under Art. 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the Committee made clear that Open Science forms part of the right to science in the digital era. Released during the Covid-19 pandemic, the timing could not have been better, for the pandemic not only illustrated in unprecedented ways the importance of science in today’s world, but also the advantages of open research practices in speeding up scientific discovery. Yet, does this legal development mean that access to scientific data and content can now be enforced before courts via the right to science? A closer look reveals that important hurdles in claiming Open Science via the right to science remain. In this short contribution, our aim is to highlight some selected challenges of implementing and adjudicating open research practices via the right to science.  

Robert-Jan Smits

The inside story of Plan S, the ground-breaking campaign pledge to end the restrictive paywalls around taxpayer funded scientific research. Vital scientific knowledge freed and instantly available to the many, not just the few. The campaign coalition's architect, Robert-Jan Smits, shares his account of the shocks that Plan S delivered to the publishing world, and of the progress that unfolded.

The question underpinning data sharing should never be whether data should be made openly accessible. The problem of data access merely distracts from the real issue with data governance, which is who decides how data is used and under which conditions. This is the key question today for both democracy and research. Answering it requires significant collective action.

Making Sure Open Science Stays Open: 10 Years of Advocating Open Science Policy by our Editor in Chief, Jean-Claude Burgelman

We asked 15 leading experts and advocates of the Open Science and Open Access movement to share their views on the significance of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science adopted in late 2021. Here are their responses and their own recommendations for how to achieve the objectives set by UNESCO.

The internet has made it possible to both collect information from individuals in an unprecedented way and to monetize that information. Information gleaned from web browsing, online purchases, emails, and social media posts comes to mind. This information is valuable because it enables vendors to better target likely purchasers, politicians to contact sympathetic voters, and so forth. The major shift of advertising dollars into web-based ads clearly illustrates the value of this information

In this episode Jean-Claude talks to Danielle Cooper and Oya Rieger of Ithaka S+R about the cancellation of big deals between subscription publishers and university libraries. 

The existing data economy undermines the foundations of open societies: meaningful democratic participation, productive collaboration, broad distribution of benefits, and fair competition. Instead, we see power centralized in a handful of players, wasted potential, and rampant economic exploitation. Consider, for example, huge networks like Facebook and Amazon that capture the information of billions of people and place it in the service of a few shareholders’ narrow interests—when the very same technologies could be harnessed to drive shared wealth and responsible progress. What to do?

In this episode Jean-Claude talks to Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, about open science, its part in the pandemic, and what happens next.

In 2001, Steve Lawrence published a hugely influential study which showed that OA conference papers in computer science were cited more than twice as often as papers that were not accessible online. But Lawrence’s paper is twenty years old and his study was limited to one kind of paper in a single discipline. Today, we know far more than in 2001. So the Policy Labs team ran a small-scale study to find out what scholars have found out.’

Richard Walker, Frontiers Policy Labs

Time will tell, but today, one and a half years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the “gloom-and-doom” predictions of world-wide recession, major disruptions in international trade, and rapidly rising unemployment appear to have been exaggerated. As the International Monetary Fund pointed out, the 2008/2009 financial crisis had a much more negative impact on the economy than either a “typical” recession or past “modern” pandemics.

In this episode Jean-Claude talks to Professor Barend Mons about big-data-driven science. He discusses the importance of data stewardship so that research findings can be shared across different countries and different scientific disciplines. 

Robert-Jan Smits
President of the Executive Board
Eindhoven University of Technology

Prof. Jean Claude Burgelman, Free University of Brussels discuss the profound and radical change COVID-19 has brought to the science-policy nexus.

Jennifer Hansen
Microsoft

Microsoft’s Jennifer Hansen, and prof. Jean Claude Burgelman of Free University of Brussels, consider the critical challenge of increasing data literacy for data specialists, sharing the benefits of open science and open data with the public