How Open Scholarship is changing research

William Gunn, Ph.D. Head of Academic Outreach

Mendeley

@mrgunn

How is Open Scholarship changing research?

Like Open Source changed the world

How did Open Source change the world?

It made software and hardware… • Better • Faster • Cheaper

What is Open Source?

• Code that’s freely available

• The product of an open, collaborative process.

What is Open Scholarship?

• Research that’s freely available.

• The product of an open, collaborative process.

Open to anyone, everyone is on the team.

Openness makes debugging easier

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Research is full of bugs

• 47 of 53 “landmark” oncology papers not reproduced (Amgen)

• 43 of 67 cardio/oncology papers contradictory (Bayer)

• 431 of 432 oncology publications not reproduced (Ioannidis)

We didn’t see that a target is

more likely to be validated if it

was reported in ten publications

or in two publications NATURE REVIEWS DRUG DISCOVERY 10, 712 (SEPTEMBER 2011)

Either the results were reproducible

and showed transferability in other

models, or even a 1:1 reproduction of

published experimental procedures

revealed inconsistencies between

published and in-house data NATURE REVIEWS DRUG DISCOVERY 10, 712 (SEPTEMBER 2011)

How does openness make research more efficient?

Open Source

• Microsoft

• Reduced costs

• More stakeholders

• More public support

• Lower barriers to entry

Open Scholarship

• Elsevier

• More stakeholders

• More public support

• Decreasing costs

• Barriers to entry still high

P212121 Science Exchange

#Rstats PeerJ eLife

Mendeley

Sustainability of open projects

Open Source

• Professional services

– Support

– Consulting

– Hosting

• Advertising

• Platform for services

Open Scholarship

• Professional services

– core facilities

– Science Exchange

• Crowdfunding

– Microryza

– Petridish

Grants do not provide long-term sustainability!

Sustainability

• Leverage economies of scale

• PubMed Central costs about $4M/year

• Elsevier costs $2B, 38% is profit

– and many of the costs are no longer necessary

“The most common barrier to accessing journal articles in both academia and industry is the requirement for researchers to pay for access. In a 2006 study, 35% of respondents reported difficulty getting access.”

RIN, PRC and JISC report. Access to scholarly content: gaps and barriers (2011). http://rinarchive.jisc-collections.ac.uk/node/1172 PRC. Journals and scientific productivity. A case study in immunologyand microbiology (2006). http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uczciro/prcwhitepaper.pdf

The Cost of Knowledge

13K signed

The future of research is in our hands

• Most journals have an Open Access option – Pick a fully open journal, not a hybrid

• Self-archiving is allowed for most works – Local repository or disciplinary(Arxiv, Pubmed

Central, etc)

• There are viable alternatives to the impact factor for research assessment – Article-level metrics such as readership, downloads,

shares convey more dimensions of impact

Building an open community

• Open Source isn’t just about source code

– Usability, communications, marketing

• Why would non-technical people care?

– For fun, for experience, for their community

• Communities are developing around diseases and problems

– PatientsLikeMe

Companies are part of the community too.

• Some of the best work in social science, political science, data science is done in industry.

• Bridging the divide

• Building tools to facilitate the process

When will this happen?

http://roarmap.eprints.org/cgi/exportview/type/funder=5Fmandate/Graph/funder=5Fmandate.png

Open Access in Biomedical Research | September 2012

http://goo.gl/2eh32

20% of papers are open access

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