Seed Media Group: Blog

Friday, January 08, 2010 • by Eva Wisten • #

The quest for open science

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy just launched Phase Three of their Public Access Policy Forum. The big question posed by the forum to scientists, primary and secondary publishers, librarians, universities, researchers, students, and the public is when and how research articles – funded by taxpayers but with value added by scholarly publishers – should be made freely available on the internet.

The Public Access Policy Forum invited a discussion around the following questions:

  * Compliance. What features does a public access policy need to ensure compliance? Should this vary across agencies?
  * Evaluation. How should an agency determine whether a public access policy is successful? What measures could agencies use to gauge whether there is increased return on federal investment gained by expanded access?
  * Roles. How might a public private partnership promote robust management of a public access policy? Are there examples already in use that may serve as models? What is the best role for the Federal government?

Here’s the reply from Adam Bly, Founder and CEO, Seed

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the Public Access Policy Forum.

We believe strongly in the potential of science and scientists to improve the state of the world and that it is the responsibility of a society that relies on science to ensure that its potential is not hindered.

To that end, we believe that new policy must recognize the critical need for an open, robust, and global online infrastructure to manage all scientific information and collaboration. In addition to rapid online access to peer reviewed articles, researchers today need a unified online environment and system that integrates data sets, applications, collaboration frameworks, and more. This system should enable public and private funding agencies, universities, and corporations to control what information can and should be shared and when, and should produce data about scientific research outputs that will indicate research trends and inform future investment decisions.

• Compliance: A unified management system for information with permissioning capabilities will allow for centralized repositories in standard formats, and open access compliance standards (formats, time delays, etc.) can be facilitated by the Federal Government and implemented as deemed appropriate by the agencies.

• Evaluation: New tools for evaluation are critical – judging success of research funding purely on publishing volume and citations is a delayed and flawed approach. To develop new metrics, there must be a standard source of data based on real-time activity through a universally-adopted system.

• Roles: Multidisciplinary, international, and public-private collaborations are essential to fostering innovation and maximizing return on funding dollars. The role of the Federal Government should be to provide the tools to public and private stakeholders to make the most of their resources and manage access according to recommended guidelines.

We urge OSTP to not only support open access to peer-reviewed research, but also to encourage investment in technical infrastructure to benefit from this access.

Thank you for undertaking this important and timely discussion.

Read all the contributions here.