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“If Covid-19 was considered important enough to change our practices, what other issues are equally important?”


lots more homogeneity around diverse data sets, and to do that we need much more metadata. If we look at 2030 it’ll be an open access paper publishing world, you’ll be able to get your hands legally on every paper. The next big challenge is the curation of data sets to make them usable in the same way that AlphaFold made use of all the PDB and UniProt data.’ The progress towards a more open


science is reliant on a mixture of technology and culture, and the interaction between the two, as Hahnel pointed out: ‘You can say that in the 1980s we had repositories where you could publish open access, green open access, but people didn’t do it. What has been amplified is the idea that the culture of open science is good, open research is good, as open as possible, as close as necessary. ‘On the open access side of things we’re


already at post-50 per cent open access publications this year, and the open access movement will just continue to grow. Researchers are more aware of the reasons why you should publish openly now, and that will continue to grow. Open data will continue to grow, we’ll continue to see a step change. Covid was one of the drivers, with the public trust of research and the need to see the numbers, but funder mandates are the other side of it with the National Institute of Health mandating Open Data associated with publications by January 2023. ‘We’ll get more evolution in the


technology, more experiments. Not all of them will work. What is the gap between a preprint and a publication? It’s just peer-review. Publishers will tell you that it’s also copy-editing and things like this, but


www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo


you can use technology for a lot of those things now. ‘But you really can’t get away from the peer-review, so I think we’ll see a middle ground of how you rate and curate preprints, and with an open data world we’ll move from not needing to check data in any way to there needing to be some level of checking going on – some level of curation, particularly around metadata, in order to make it FAIR, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reuseable.’


Building back a better open science It would be hard not to consider open science as one of the successes of the pandemic, although the nature of that success is probably more subtle than many would like. Although there was a step change in open access and open data, this should be seen as part of the overall ongoing trend towards open science. There are other areas of openness that may have been paused during the pandemic, and aspects of open data that have raised new challenges around issues of trust. We are also left with the inevitable question: if Covid-19 was considered important enough to change our practices, however temporarily, what other issues are equally important? The Covid-19 pandemic is only one


of many big challenges facing society – and some of the most significant have been summed up in the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). The 17 goals, ranging from health and poverty to tackling climate change, dwarf the problems of the pandemic, and often require cross-disciplinary joined up thinking. It is not a case of simply partitioning off those articles that may help with a particular problem – problems and solutions can spring from anywhere. The increasing interest in the SDGs is demonstrated by the growing interest in the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings, and it seems inevitable that people will ask: If we could do it for Covid, why not for this SDG? As with a lot of society, the publishing sector finds itself facing the question of whether we will ‘build back better’ or get back to ‘business as usual’.


The challenges remain the same


from the publishers’ perspective, but researchers’ and the public’s expectations will have undoubtedly risen. While open science is increasingly recognised as a common good, there is no one-size-fits-all solution – diversity of disciplines require different responses. Covid may have given open science a temporary nudge, but it is an evolving process and best practice will take time to emerge.


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