Analysis and news
Accelerating open science in physics Daniel Keirs considers open science from the perspective of a physics publisher, including some of the steps needed to accelerate progress
Open science has numerous definitions, but it includes making science more accessible, reusable and transparent, increasing reach and reproducibility, and fostering trust in its results. It’s also about cultural change and
increasing the diversity and inclusivity of people and ideas. It is the right thing to do, and strengthens scientific integrity and trust, but it can also help accelerate scientific discovery by enabling more people to collaborate and share ideas efficiently and cooperatively. Physics was one of the earliest
scientific communities to embrace internet-enabled open science. The arXiv repository, where researchers in physics and related disciplines can share drafts of their scientific papers publicly before submission to a journal, was established in the early 1990s. In the last decade SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), an initiative coordinated by CERN, enabled most journals in particle and high-energy physics to transition fully to an open access publication model.
By the end of 2014, arXiv hosted more than one million preprints and has seen annual growth in the upload of new papers of more than 10 per cent in recent years – suggesting researchers increasingly see benefit in sharing their work earlier and openly before formal publication. Simultaneously, the number of peer- reviewed physics articles published in open access journals almost doubled between 2016 and 2019. The expansion in potential access to articles can support faster and wider impact of research. In 2020, the global coronavirus pandemic has underlined the role open science can play: highlighting the value in the open dissemination of scientific results in maximising access, combined with rigorous but prompt peer review to further scrutinise and verify claims to maintain trust and integrity in the scientific record. These needs are not new this year, but the urgency of the scientific response to the pandemic has emphasised them. Learned society publishers like us,
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rooted within a scientific community, must help address the need to make science more open and reliable – both in the context of the current pandemic and for the longer-term advancement of the physical sciences.
When thinking about how we do this,
we must ask: What can we do to improve scientists’ ability to discover, read, interpret, share and build upon the outputs of scientific research? And how can we enable researchers to better observe how scientific claims are developed and asserted, and better understand the checks and processes a scientific work undergoes before public dissemination? All have their own challenges, which we are working to address in our own scientific community context through our ‘open physics’ programme. This is our commitment to supporting increased access, transparency and inclusivity in the physical sciences.
All about access Access is fundamental to making science more open. Accessible research results provide a foundation for broader scientific engagement and collaboration. A collaboration may be literal, through researchers from different backgrounds recognising a previously siloed common challenge. Others may be more abstract, as open research that can be read and
“The pandemic has underlined the role of open science”
built upon is better able to inform and even inspire future research projects. We have seen a steady increase in the
size and range of open access publication venues in the physical sciences. Over the past three years we estimate the number of larger open access journals (those publishing more than 100 articles per year) rose by around 30 per cent, from 23 in 2016 to 30 titles in 2019. However, many communities are not yet evenly served by open access publication venues – particle
and nuclear physicists and those in optics and photonics are better served than most other physics sub-disciplines for instance. And although we have those 30 open access publications, there remain more than 500 larger publication venues for physics that do not operate on an exclusively open access model. We are among the growing number of publishers launching fully open access journals. We have launched eight since 2016, covering a range of fields in physics, materials science, energy, photonics, environmental science and machine learning. However, to ensure researchers can publish openly and continue to choose the right venue for their research, we still enable authors to choose what is known as hybrid open access (where an article is published under an open licence in a subscription-based journal). This model will remain crucial to growth in open research for some time. The practicalities of getting from where
we are to a more open publishing, open science landscape are often overlooked, given the considerable cultural and financial obstacles. Scientific research is a global endeavour.
But moving to a fully open publishing model may erect new financial barriers to those in relatively less well-funded subject areas and geographical regions. For instance, we know researchers based in lower-income economies have fewer resources to cover the costs of open access article publication charges. Even better-funded groups in many countries may not be incentivised to prioritise funds for open access publication (especially when existing subscription- based journals may serve their needs in all other respects). To provide some shorter-term support many publishers, including us, reduce or even remove open access charges for researchers based in lower-income economies. But this model is unlikely to be sufficiently sustainable to support transition to open publishing globally. New open publishing models that avoid
author-based charges are becoming more common, albeit largely in Europe currently. Often called transformative agreements, they see institutions or
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