Feature
While open science has gained from the pandemic many challenges remain, writes David Stuart
There can be no doubt that Covid-19 gave a boost to open science. There’s nothing quite like a global pandemic to focus the mind on the need for openness and collaboration, and publishers and researchers quickly took unprecedented steps to reduce the barriers of access to research articles and data.
But as things begin to return to a ‘new normal’, and some of the barriers begin to reappear, it is important to consider what open science has actually gained from the pandemic, and some of the challenges that remain to be overcome in the face of other global challenges.
Open science in the pandemic Any discussion of open science in the pandemic is necessarily an over simplification. Researchers’ experiences will have differed considerably depending on their field and personal circumstances. For those working in areas directly aligned with the pandemic, the focus will have been on ensuring research findings and data were shared as widely and quickly as possible. For those in other fields it may have been about trying to find
new ways of working off campus and away from the lab. It is also important to recognise that
open science is much broader than just the open access and open data discussions that gain much of the attention. It can refer to a wide range of activities in the research lifecycle, from the way science is captured through open notebooks to the way it is measured with open bibliometrics, and while some areas of open science will have gained additional attention in the pandemic, others will have been neglected. If there was one feature of open science that was universal in the pandemic, however, it was the speed with which things needed to change. Mark Hahnel, CEO and founder of the open access repository Figshare, and Hannah Heckner, director of product strategy at Silverchair, shared their thoughts about open science during and after the pandemic, and both emphasised the shift in speed as seen from their different perspectives. For Heckner, working for a leading independent platform provider for scholarly and professional publishers, this was the speed of change to open access
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“While some areas of open science will have gained additional attention in the pandemic, others will have been neglected”
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December 2021/January 2022 Research Information
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