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An opinion article recently published in the Science Policy Research gateway on F1000Research covers the outcomes from an invitation-only workshop entitled “Imagining Tomorrow’s University.” 

The NIH- and NSF-funded workshop brought together early career researchers, university leaders, funding agencies, and eleven organizers and other stakeholders to launch a new dialog around open research –  the current status, opportunities for advancement, challenges that limit sharing, and how universities should adapt to this new landscape.  

In this Q&A, we catch up with the article author Daniel S. Katz, Assistant Director, Scientific Software and Applications at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and peer reviewers; Lucy Montgomery, Associate Professor at Curtin University and Olivia Guest, Research Associate at UCL to find out more about their views on open scholarship and how universities can take the best advantage of opportunities brought about by current changes in scholarship and society.

One of the themes outlined from the workshop was that open scholarship would benefit society – Can you give your opinion on what you believe the benefits to society would be?

OG: The main benefits to society, in my opinion, are twofold. Firstly, people will be able to reach a better understanding of what scholars do. This is very important for navigating the 21st-century world where advanced technologies permeate our lives and ethical questions might need to be (re)hashed based on these novel technologies and/or changing social morals. People being better informed, as users of new technologies, for example, could lead to better technologies (since they will be better placed to give feedback) resulting in a virtuous cycle of feedback and improvement. Secondly, and based on the first point, improving the public’s understanding of experts could allow evidence-based decision-making to become more mainstream, e.g., in politics and government so as to deal with climate change.

Open scholarship communities are powerful sources of collaboration, risk-taking, and experimentation. They are also important mechanisms for sharing new knowledge. If Universities are to fulfill their open knowledge potential, they will need the energy and the problem-solving power of these communities.

DK: I believe that new knowledge and education are strongly beneficial to society, and that open scholarship is a great method for generating new knowledge, and making it available for formal and informal education, as well as sharing of educational methods. In addition, society has to see the benefits of scholarship to support it, and given the public funding of most scholarships, providing the public as much insight into the processes and results is essential to keep public support.

LM: For me, the most obvious benefit of open scholarship – particularly open access publishing – is that it lowers barriers to access. Ensuring that research outputs are available to individuals and communities that would benefit from the knowledge that they contain is a key first step in making sure that research has a positive impact on the world. But lowering barriers to access for research outputs isn’t enough on its own: we also need to ensure that research engages with the needs and perspectives of diverse communities. Supporting diversity within research communities and encouraging two-way knowledge sharing between scholars and the wider community are strategies for achieving this.

What does the idea of open science mean to you, your field and your research?

LM: As a researcher employed within a Humanities faculty, the term ‘open science’ has always made me a little uneasy. Whether open science is intended to include Humanities scholarship never seems entirely clear. However, I feel strongly about the importance of openness for Humanities scholarship. I also believe that HSS perspectives have much to offer in conversations about how knowledge landscapes do, and could, function. As such, I choose to understand the term ‘open science’ as one that is intended to be inclusive.

To me, then, open science represents an important opportunity: to create research landscapes that reflect the possibilities of networked digital technologies; to improve the quality of research; and to make scholarly knowledge more inclusive, diverse, and useful. These opportunities are as valuable and exciting for Humanities-based scholars as they are for researchers working in the ‘hard sciences. They are also just as challenging.

My own research engages with questions of how the systems and institutions that support research can enable openness. This includes work on Universities as Open Knowledge Institutions. The concept of open knowledge that our group is exploring engages with questions of how universities might build on the technical possibilities of open access and open source; as well as the social possibilities of open society, open governance and open science.

DK: Open scholarship, which is the term I prefer as being most inclusive, means to me:

• Openly sharing outputs of my work, whether as papers, software, data, or something else
• Openly sharing the processes by which I work in enough detail that someone else can reproduce them and build from them
• Openly contributing to others as part of a community, whether in terms of mentoring, reviewing, commenting, co-organizing, or helping to inform
• Openly sharing ideas that I think will benefit the scholarly community so that others can pick them and move forward on them, if they choose. I have not yet gotten to the point of openly writing proposals, as some do, but I hope I will eventually.
• While I am primarily a researcher and not a teacher, open scholarship also includes open education, including educational content and processes.

I think open scholarship is a way of thinking and acting that is fundamentally optimistic: I give away my work and thoughts for the greater good and expect that others will also do so. I think this works because we have a shared scholarly culture that supports this and have disincentives for those who try to take advantage of it, and ideally, open scholarship and scholarly culture are mutually reinforcing.

The biggest challenge for ECRs that I see is access to high-quality post-doctoral research opportunities. There is a mismatch between the number of PhDs graduating and the number of academic positions that the system supports.

OG: Open science to me means doing various things (releasing data, code, etc.) that allow more people both inside and outside science to access and understand the data, the outputs, the process, etc., where ethically and legally possible. This includes, for example, being more inclusive and thus more open to, groups of people who historically have had less access to science education and are less represented within science. My field(s) focus heavily on open access, methodology and data, placing a lot of emphasis on reproducibility, especially on the idea of a “crisis”. Other aspects of open science like community science, for example, are less discussed at present.

Regarding my research, open research involves blogging in accessible ways about my work and science generally, releasing my code and data, publishing in open access journals, and submitting manuscripts as preprints.

Out of the six areas which the participants worked on, which do you believe to be the most important for the future of universities and why?

Credit and attribution, communities, education, outreach and engagement, preservation and reproducibility, and technologies

LM: All the areas that the workshop addressed have a key role to play in the future of the University. However, if I am forced to choose just one area it would have to be communities. This is because the possibilities and limitations of open science can only be explored by groups. Expecting individual researchers to figure out open science on their own would be as daft as asking a lone researcher to figure out how telephones might change the world. Telephones are only fun if you have a friend who also has one. Open scholarship communities are powerful sources of collaboration, risk-taking, and experimentation. They are also important mechanisms for sharing new knowledge. If Universities are to fulfill their open knowledge potential, they will need the energy and the problem-solving power of these communities.

Open scholarship communities are powerful sources of collaboration, risk-taking, and experimentation. They are also important mechanisms for sharing new knowledge.

OG: For the future of universities specifically and speaking from a UK perspective, outreach and engagement with the public might help stop universities being misunderstood or seen as excessively elitist. For example, even people who think universities are good, think of undergraduate teaching as the only service provided. Given that almost all universities in the UK are publicly funded it seems like the public should be better informed.

DK: I personally think credit and attribution is the most important of the six workshop areas because incentives and culture can drive changes in all the other areas. I am convinced that what scholars get credit for plays a very large part in what they choose to do. Note that I might be biased since credit for software is a key area of my own research.

In terms of university structure, what do you believe to be the greatest obstacle that ECRs face?

DK: I think the biggest obstacle is the early career researchers receive two conflicting messages.  One is do what you think is right; the other is do what the tenure guidelines say you need to do, and once you get tenure, then you can do what you think is right, whether this is acting openly, working across disciplines, or focusing efforts outside of academia in the larger society. Tenure guidelines usually use long-established metrics to focus narrowly on work within the discipline, which is counter to open scholarship.

OG: Again, from a UK perspective, the greatest obstacle for ECRs seems to be a lack of transparency and understanding of the system. Being a PI, for example, might not be what everybody wants, and it might be infeasible for everybody to become a PI. Academia seems like a very shallow pyramid with a very large number of students and postdocs and a very small number of PIs. But research-related jobs don’t, or least don’t have to, all fit neatly into a linear hierarchy from PhD to PI. Thus, ECRs should be given more and more appropriate mentoring to understand and overcome such issues. Maybe we should rethink the whole system, although this burden should not be on ECRs alone.

LM: I am currently working in the Australian university system. The biggest challenge for ECRs that I see is access to high-quality post-doctoral research opportunities. There is a mismatch between the number of PhDs graduating and the number of academic positions that the system supports. As a result, opportunities for researchers to find their feet as scholars after completing a PhD are vanishingly rare. Formal pathways into secure academic positions are even rarer.

I believe that new knowledge and education are strongly beneficial to society, and that open scholarship is a great method for generating new knowledge, and making it available for formal and informal education, as well as sharing of educational methods.

What hopes do you have for the outcomes of the next proposed workshop?

LM: It would be wonderful to hear more about how the ideas developed in the workshop might apply beyond North America and Western Europe. I am also keen to find out more about how we might connect the work that we are doing on open knowledge institutions with the Tomorrow’s University project.

DK: If we can get a couple of universities with a range of leaders (presidents, provosts, deans, chairs) who believe this is important and promising enough to put some effort into it, as well as a few early career scholars at those institutions, I would like to see a workshop that designs a multi-year experiment that can be compared to a control group of universities. My hope is that some positive changes would be seen relatively quickly, such as new scholars who want to work in those universities, increased grant funding, and improve relationships with local society and local legislators.

In addition, because it is difficult to change the culture in existing organizations, another interesting outcome would be for a new university, such as the next Olin, KAUST, or Skoltech, to implement open scholarship at its core.

OG: Ideally, I’d like to see more focus on what openness means in theory and practice. Who are we trying to make academia and scholarship open to? Perhaps those groups should be consulted.

To view Daniel’s paper, Lucy and Olivia’s reviews just click here