Last time I briefly wrote about one of science’s biggest problems, that is, the fact that a disturbingly vast amount of (published) research turns out to be irreproducible, partly because of questionable research methods. One way to potentially fix this is to make results openly accessible to everyone, be it an original grant proposal*, raw data, or the publications resulting from this. Open Access, i.e., breaking down paywalls and making science purely public, has been a matter of debate for some 15 years now, and although there are tremendous efforts within the scientific and publishing community, it seems like the progress is only advancing very slowly. Initiatives like OpenCon, originally a conference held in Brussels in November, attempt to educate researchers about the merits of Open Science by giving a voice to people who in some way or another are engaged in promoting openness.

Today I attended an OpenCon satellite event at the MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. That Open Science has not really reached the “scientific mainstream” yet is already reflected in the fact that I did not hear about the event by an invitation sent out through one of the university’s mailing lists (after all, shouldn’t this be the way of informing university stuff about things like this?) but through the advertisement of a friend, who is a PhD student at the MPI, on Facebook. Social media: 1, traditional communication ways: 0. Upon entering the lecture room, the next mild disappointment ensued: Although 55 people had subscribed for the event, only about 30 actually showed up — which, even taking into account the poor prior announcement, is only a fraction of the long list of MPI employees. I found it especially telling that the large majority of the attendants were junior researchers, which in my opinion is one of the biggest problems of Open Science. People at the beginning of their academic careers have a lot to lose; they haven’t built up a scientific reputation yet, so eventually not many people will care (or even notice) their steps towards changing the system, whereas senior researchers could actually have an impact and function as role models for implementing change. Unfortunately, many of them don’t seem to care enough to attend an event like this, which makes me question their overall motivation in taking real, noticeable steps into a better direction.

Luckily, of course, there are also exceptions, two of them being invited speakers for the conference. Lambert Heller, leader of the Open Science Lab at the German National Library of Science and Technology, gave an introductory talk on ways to make science more open, and Daniel Mietchen, data scientist at NIH, elaborated on this by presenting an extensive list of pro-openness initiatives already taking place (many, many links can be found on his Github). While the gist of what they said wasn’t exactly news to me (although I’m glad for getting introduced to things like the RIO Journal, Hypothes.is, Zenodo, and re3data.org), I certainly always like listening to people who appear to be enthusiastic about what they’re doing. On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder how viable their aspirations are, especially when you apply them to fundamental research. I can definitely see how making anonymous patient data or case studies accessible through quick channels, i.e., circumventing months of publishing bureaucracy, accelerates progress in the medical sciences. However, I believe we’re still far, far away from a world where everyone uploads their collected data in psychology and neuroscience straight to a public server, either because they’re afraid academic proponents might misuse it, or they themselves want to keep it secret at least until they squeezed as many significant results out of it as possible. So if you wish, I had hoped for a more applied perspective on how an atmosphere of openness can be achieved in basic research.

That this is technically possible, at least regarding the financial aspect, was suggested by an unfortunately rather chaotic and unmotivated talk by Kai Karin Geschuhn from the Max Planck Digital Library. I must admit I had trouble following her story because her presentation style reminded me of someone who prepared a 1-hour talk for a 10-minute slot. What stuck with me, however, was the fact that per year, libraries spend 7.6 billion Euros to access some 1.5 million subscription-journal articles, which means that for accessing a single paper, around 5.000 Euros are spent for journal subscriptions. Apparently the goal of the MPDL is to sort of reverse that process by encouraging people to publish in Open Access journals while bearing the expenses for them (certainly less than 5.000 Euros per piece). Certainly that’s a step in the right direction, although I couldn’t help but feel skeptical when she tried to demonstrate the success of this campaign by presenting a graph which showed that publications (I believe from the Max Planck Society only) in Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley had decreased and publications in OA journals had increased when there is a huge extra amount of papers (roughly those of the “evil publishers” and OA combined) labelled “Other subscription publishers”. I guess what we can learn from that – again – is that it’s a path of trial and tribulation.

Between the talks we watched video recordings of presentations given by Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia foundation, and Mike Eisen, co-founder of PLoS. The latter, to me, proved a good example of the role model I mentioned earlier. Granted, when he started getting involved in PLoS, he was a postdoc at Stanford with a decent publication record in the supposedly impactful journals, so the drop height, for him, was already comparably negligible. What I do admire, though, is the fact that he keeps propelling his vision, ultimately raising critical and literally open scientific offspring.

At the end of the day, a lot of questions remained unanswered for me, many of which obviously cannot be tackled in a one-day conference. I do support open outlets in all fields of science, because it simply doesn’t make sense to restrict research that is funded by tax money to a hand-picked elite. Then again, I am still doubtful about the long-term implementation because frankly, I can’t envision a world in which everyone publishes everything and peer review takes place post-publication — I am afraid that this will make it even more difficult to keep an overview of the output which is already large now (1.5 million papers per year, remember?). At the moment, filing registered reports, to me, seems the best compromise: Much like a mini grant proposal, you outline a planned study in meticulous detail, and once it’s done, you get to publish the results, including data and scripts, no matter what.

In sum, it was an interesting day at the MPI and I’m glad I happened to be there. What I have learnt is that we’re only at the beginning of a paradigm shift in science – but little by little, the bird will build its nest, and everyone is free to watch its progress.

* By the way, my grant proposal, about the rejection of which I whined at the beginning of the year, got accepted in the second round, so I’ll be going to Nijmegen next April. Yay! Coincidentally, the Radboud University launched an Open Access week in October, so I think I’ll be in good company :)