Celsius | School of Communications
Celsius 2014
Challenges of open science
Eighth science//society symposium
30-31 January 2014
Keynote talk: Alma Swan, Convenor of Enabling Open Scholarship, an international network of universities committed to open scholarship; Director of Advocacy, SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an alliance of academic libraries promoting more open scholarly communication on “Who’s afraid of open access?”
Alma Swan, opened the symposium with her keynote address ‘Who’s afraid of open access?’ She introduced the open access concept, noting that open access to literature and research outputs is crucial to open science. To put open access in context, Swan gave an overview of its history, beginning with the 1666 Proceedings of the Royal Society, then moving on to 1950s CERN, and bringing it up to today’s explosion of journals, research and publishing and the use of online repositories such as RIAN.ie Swan outlined some of the issues which were slowing the pace of open access publishing, including lack of awareness among the research community, the lack of recognition of open access publishing in academic rewards systems and indeed the general slowness of academics to use the web for communication.
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Patricia Clarke, Senior Policy Analyst, Health Research Board; Co-chair, National Steering Committee on Open Access on “Open Access publishing: Ireland and abroad”
Patricia Clarke’s presentation followed, she described the work of Science Europe, a policy body, including their survey about open access. Clarke described some models of open access, and Ireland’s policy on same.
Clarke noted that every university in Ireland has a repository, and the next aim is to widen this out to other institutions which do research, such as hospitals, charities etc. Ireland is on a par with Denmark or Portugal regarding political commitment to open access, and that this commitment has driven change in local organisations, for example the HSE and the Department of Food, Agriculture and the Marine have published policies on open access.
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Keynote talk: Rick Holliman, Champion for Public Engagement with Research, Open University, UK: on “Towards an open research university—reflections on a programme of institutional change”
Rick Holliman spoke about his work as the Open University’s Champion for Public Engagement with Research. The idea of public engagement with research is to embed ‘openness’ into research generally, Holliman emphasised this by quoting one of his interviewees: “I don't want to be a private intellectual, I want to be public”. This is a disruptive idea and not supported by everyone. Open (public) scholarship makes projects digitally visible and therefore open to criticism and comment. Holliman described how some research—about love, learning disabilities and religion in London—had been opened up.
Holliman went on to describe the work of the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, which encourages scientists to self-assess where they are with regards to public engagement, and where they’d like to be. Holliman noted that leadership from above is required in order to make open research mainstream.
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Alessandro Delfanti, Research fellow, McGill University, Montreal, Canada; Author, Biohackers—the politics of open science (Pluto Press 2013) on: “High energy papers, open access in perspective.”
Alessandro Delfanti gave an account of his work researching the Journal of High Energy Physics (JoHEP), an online and open access academic journal established by a small group of Italian scientists in the mid-nineties. JoHEP attracted papers from famous physicists and established itself as a journal. Almost a quarter of papers published came from the USA.
Delfanti described the genealogy of open access of high energy physics, from CERN policies to the SCOAP3‘s (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) (subsidised) gold model. In his interviews with physicists, he found that they did not read journals, as they used the archive instead. Delfanti is exploring scientific communities’ resistance to change, as well as the re-mediation of the journal format and the role of openness in changing science’s institutions.
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David Slawson, newly appointed Director of OPAL (Open Air Laboratories), former Head of Plant Health Public Engagement, Food and Environment Research Agency, UK on “Open laboratories and citizen science” Dr David Slawson, the incoming director of OPAL (Open Air Laboratories) opened the second day of the symposium. He described the work of OPAL, and the need for local networks of experts and citizen scientists to carry out projects about biodiversity and climate. OPAL means the research is moving away from universities towards organisations closer to the ground, this means that the net can be spread wider and much more data gathered, Slawson also noted that citizen science surveys need to be carefully designed.
Slawson was joined by a panel of open science / citizen science practitioners including Karin Dubsky of Coastwatch, David McKeown of Science Hack Day, Cathal Garvey of Indie Biotech, and Lynn Scarff of the Science Gallery.