• National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (UK)

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17 September 2010A new RIN/NESTA project looks at a series [of] case studies examining what motivates researchers to work in an open way with regard to their data.

RIN and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) have published the results of a new collaborative research project which examined the benefits and barriers to using ‘open science’ methods. The project aimed to identify what motivates researchers to work (or want to work) in an open manner with regard to their data, results and protocols, and whether advantages are delivered by working in this way.

Open Science broadly describes science carried out and communicated in a manner which allows others to contribute, collaborate and add to the research effort, with all kinds of data, results and protocols made freely available at different stages of the research process. Proponents of the approach argue that such collaboration will lead to more efficient research and innovation.

This report has been produced to provide researchers, research institutions and funders with a better understanding of why some researchers choose to work in this manner, the benefits that occur and the barriers that prevent others from using open science methodology.

The RIN and NESTA contracted the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) to undertake this project."

Background

Since the early 1990s, the open access movement has promoted the concept of openness in relation to scientific research. Focusing initially upon the records of science in the form of the text of articles in scholarly journals, interest has broadened in the last decade to include a much wider range of materials produced by researchers. At the same time, concepts of openness and access have also developed to include various kinds of use, by machines as well as humans.

Academic bodies, including funders and groups of researchers, have set out statements in support of various levels of openness in research. Such statements often focus upon two key dimensions: what is made open, and how; and to whom is it made open, and under what conditions? This study set out to consider the practice of six research groups from a range of disciplines in order to better understand how principles of openness are translated into practice.

Method
The study consists of interviews with 18 researchers working across 6 UK research institutions. The aim was to identify a range of practices, not to draw conclusions that could be generalised to an entire population. Research teams were therefore selected to represent not only convinced advocates of openness, but also individuals or groups which are more selective about what they share and perhaps more sceptical of the open agenda. Each team included a senior researcher at PI level along with some of their more junior colleagues. Interviews were structured to uncover researchers’ levels of openness at various stages of the research lifecycle.

Key findings

Benefits of openness

Researchers identified several distinctive benefits to open behaviour in their work:
1. increasing the efficiency of research, for example by avoiding duplication of effort, by making research tools, protocols and examples of good practice more readily available, by reducing the costs of data collection, and by promoting the adoption of open standards.
2. promoting scholarly rigour and enhancements to the quality of research, for example by making information about working methods, protocols and data more readily available for peer review and scrutiny, and enhancing the scope and quality of the material published in the scholarly record, including negative results.
3. enhancing visibility and scope for engagement, with opportunities for wider engagements, across the research community and other, broader, communities, including new possibilities for ‘citizen science’ and for public  engagement with the processes and results of research.
4. enabling researchers to ask new research questions, and to address questions in new ways through re-use of data and other material created by other researchers, supporting the development of ‘data-intensive science’ through the ability to aggregate and re-analyse data from a wide range of sources.
5. enhancing collaboration and community-building, for example by providing new opportunities for collaboration across institutional, national and disciplinary boundaries, and for the sharing of knowledge and expertise.