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the scientific process, and typically the pandemic had the effect of exacerbating existing inequalities.


Post-pandemic open science Open science after the pandemic, will inevitably be different from both open science during the pandemic and open science before the pandemic. Those researchers who were driven to data- driven science as the wet labs closed, or had more time to publish their data online, will inevitably have returned to something like pre-pandemic normalcy with more lab work and less time for data cleaning, publishing and reuse. But other aspects will change. While publishers will reintroduce paywalls, they will inevitably want to learn from the longer-term ongoing and inevitable trend towards open science.


As Heckner pointed out, this can bring


new data needs: ‘They’re starting to put up some more of their paywalls in a more thoughtful approach, and we need to figure out how to get the data that those publishers need in order to make those decisions: to explore new access models, and to support off-campus access for that content that is no-longer open access or perhaps was never opened up for access.’


“The onwards march towards open science means even the most established of barriers are slowly being overcome”


The onwards march towards open


science means even the most established of barriers are slowly being overcome. For example, both Heckner and Hahnel raised the ongoing issue of the culture of science, with the publication of a few articles in high impact factor journals having an excessively high impact on an individual’s career. Heckner said: ‘We’ve been seeing a lot


of really great movement in this area with open access journals being really valued in the research ecosystem, but there’s still some people who say ‘in order to get tenure I need to publish in X,Y,Z’ and that may be behind a paywall’. Although as Hahnel noted, while we still live in a world where your career is set with a couple of articles published in Nature, it


has changed in recent years so that you can now publish the preprints and still be published in Nature. At the same time, we’re also seeing a


wider range of content coming online, as Heckner explained: ‘We’re definitely seeing a diverse content set coming onto the platform. There’s a desire to get all the different artefacts from publishing, which might have been more ephemeral before, digitised so that they are durable moving forward. ‘There’s an increased emphasis on digestible research. Incorporating more multimedia into your research. Getting videos of discussion between researchers, rather than having them take the time to perhaps write a preprint and post it. So getting these more digestible, snackable, and accessible pieces of science out to readers, that’s certainly something we see continuing on in the future.’ Associated with the issue of culture and


new content is the issue of trust. This is an expanding issue as new forms of content are beginning to appear online, and cultural expectations change. For example, as Heckner pointed


out, there is an increased expectation of transparency throughout the review process: ‘Trust and transparency between


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