Implementing open science

The SNSF invited a dozen organisations to present initiatives for promoting open science at a workshop held on 14 September 2015. The Norwegian research funding organisation has already taken measures to include a data management plan in some schemes. The National Institute of Health in the United States is thinking about prescribing data sharing, while the World Health Organisation and the Wellcome Trust are campaigning to make epidemiological data and data collected in clinical studies freely available. Paul Ayris presented the initiatives of the EU and the League of European Research Universities (LERU).

There was a consensus among participants that the culture of science needs to change. However, Benedikt Fecher from the Alexander Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society dampened the mood of expectation by pointing out that researchers had misgivings about open data because they feared others would benefit from data they had collected. He argued that open science can only be achieved if we respect the unique nature of each discipline. It also became clear that not everyone agreed on the best way forward: some scientists, like Daniël Lakens from the University of Technology in Eindhoven, favour a bottom-up approach that would enable researchers to develop open science principles as freely as possible. At the same time, the organisations want to create a framework for clarifying a number of technicalities and legal issues.