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I am excited to be presenting at the first GODAN Summit in New York on 15-16^th September in conjunction with the 71^st Session of the UN General Assembly. GODAN (Global Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition) is a high-level initiative to make agriculture and nutrition research data publicly available, so that the insights and knowledge they contain can be better used in efforts to feed the 800 million people across the world that suffer from hunger and malnutrition today.

The project was formed in 2013 following a commitment by G-8 leaders to share their countries’ relevant agricultural data with African farmers, researchers and policy makers. GODAN has grown rapidly, and now encompasses a network of over 350 worldwide partners from national governments to non-governmental, international and private sector organisations.

This year, GODAN holds its first international summit, and features an illustrious line-up of speakers that includes: Jeffrey Sachs, Senior Advisor to the UN; Ann Aerts, Head of the Novartis Foundation; and Tom Vilsack, US Secretary of Agriculture.

On the second day of the Summit, I will present new approaches to communicating scientific data openly and transparently using open science publishing models.  I will also discuss how the research community can work together to help to incentivise researchers and others to support the agriculture and nutrition open data movement.

Data sharing in agrisciences and nutrition

It is well established that closed data not only prevents others from re-using it for further research but can be extremely expensive due to the vast expenditure wasted on irreproducible studies. This is exacerbated by the fact that a large proportion of findings are never shared such as negative and null data, as they are too difficult and time-consuming to get published. Not only is this a waste of resources, but it also biases the publication record and skews our understanding of science.

Opening up agriculture and nutrition research data has the power to transform the practices of smallholder and large-scale farmers alike. Although such data are rarely used directly by farmers, their broader impact on improving agricultural productivity, sustainability and biodiversity is immeasurable.

This is already happening in a number of research communities, the genomics community for example has a history and culture of openness and provision of excellent data infrastructures to support discoverability, access and reuse; for example Ensembl and CassavaBase.  Much of the recent open crop genome data is likely to have a profound impact on agriculture and nutrition, just as the Human Genome Project is achieving in medicine.

However, for much of the agriscience community, there is work to do; currently research data associated with published articles remains slow and difficult to access.  For data associated with an article, the typical delay of months to years to publish means that the related data often remains inaccessible during this time, delaying its benefits.  Such long lag times cannot be justified when data have the potential to address issues as critically important as hunger, poverty and biodiversity loss, as well as time-sensitive events such as crop disease outbreaks.

How do we incentivise a shift to open data and open science?

There is increasing impetus to incentivise researchers and related organisations to move towards open science, with major organisations stating their commitment to aspects of open science, including GODAN, the EU, Wellcome, and research institutions such as McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute.

We believe that an active collaboration between research funders, institutions and publishers is key to facilitating a shift towards open science and open data.  Research funders and institutions have an interest in ensuring the best outcomes and impact of the research and researchers that they support and have invested in; they can provide the incentives and reward the sort of behaviours that will help bring about change and impact.  Research funding agencies have a lot to gain from open research: it enables open critique of data and allows errors to be spotted early, preventing further funding on projects that might have built upon inaccurate conclusions; open data also prevents unnecessary duplication of efforts on lines of enquiry that have already been found not to work, reducing research waste.

F1000Research has adopted a radical approach to publishing research and original findings that supports rapid and unbiased access to research data and accelerates the pace of science.

Using this model, F1000 has also been building open publishing tools and infrastructure to enable organisations to provide their researchers with a venue to publish any new research findings and data they wish to share, rapidly and openly. We believe that the decision about what research findings to share and when should reside with researchers.

Funders and institutions have the leverage, reputation and trust of researchers and can catalyse a change of mindset to benefit science and provide the incentive and reward system for researchers to share more and earlier.  Technology provides opportunities to share research in new and innovative ways – and to speed and open things up, and create more connections. Publishers are in a good position to deliver that innovation.  At F1000 we are now rethinking our role, acting as a service provider to funding agencies and institutions that want to encourage ‘their’ researchers to share their research and data.

Our first funding agency partnership was announced in July and will launch later this year in conjunction with Wellcome: Wellcome Open Research.  The platform is owned by Wellcome with F1000 providing the technology and services. This enables Wellcome grantees to share any work they want to in an open science way on the platform, and means that all research products and outputs can be used by others, recognised, valued and rewarded.

We are now working with organisations across all fields of research and expect other major funders and organizations will join this movement.  This will be an important shift that will benefit all fields of research, but is especially urgent in time-critical areas that directly affect the life and health of large swathes of the population such as in hunger and poverty.