Science as an Open Enterprise

"Modern computers permit massive datasets to be assembled and explored in ways that reveal inherent but unsuspected relationships. This data-led science is a promising new source of knowledge."

This report highlights the need to organise, through a standard of "intelligent openness", data created by modern technologies in order to preserve the principle of openness and to exploit data in ways that have the potential to serve science and enhance its relationship with and relevance to the public: "Exploring massive amounts of data using modern digital technologies has enormous potential for science and its application in public policy and business." The Royal Society report maps out the changes that are required by scientists, their institutions, and those that fund and support science if this potential is to be realised.

The emergence of linked data technologies creates new information through deeper integration of data across different datasets with the potential to greatly enhance automated approaches to data analysis. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to create novel social dynamics in science.

From the report summary: "Successful exploitation of these powerful new approaches will come from six changes: (1) a shift away from a research culture where data is viewed as a private preserve; (2) expanding the criteria used to evaluate research to give credit for useful data communication and novel ways of collaborating; (3) the development of common standards for communicating data; (4) mandating intelligent openness for data relevant to published scientific papers; (5) strengthening the cohort of data scientists needed to manage and support the use of digital data (which will also be crucial to the success of private sector data analysis and the government’s Open Data strategy); and (6) the development and use of new software tools to automate and simplify the creation and exploitation of datasets. The means to make these changes are available. But their realisation needs an effective commitment to their use from scientists, their institutions and those who fund and support science."

In considering communicating with citizens, the report recognises the problem of the demand for levels of understanding of complex information beyond a citizen's grasp. Trust in "experts" is the alternative. "If democratic consent is to be gained for public policies that depend on difficult or uncertain science, the nature of that trust will depend to a significant extent on open and effective communication within expert scientific communities and their participation in public debate." This will require an effort to make data relevant, intelligible, useable, and available to the public.

The document considers the matter of internationalising scientific information across states and the possibility of its politicisation due to the fact that much science is funded by state citizens. Further, it considers what are "legitimate boundaries of openness," maintained in order to protect commercial value, privacy, safety, and security.

The document explores, according to authors, an additional fundamental reason that open data is vital: closing the data gap is a method of maintaining science’s self-correction principle, by linking the data that supports an argument within "a published paper, together with the metadata that makes them comprehensible and usable, to be lodged in a curated database that is accessible via the click of a mouse on a live link in the published paper." This requires trust - described as essential to research publication - and suggests that the linking of open datasets to papers should be the default as a standard. In addition to establishing a basis for communicating results among scientists and citizens, the open data could increase commercial opportunities through the possibility of speeding up the scientific process of corroborating or disproving results, building upon them, or acting as an open mechanism of finding fraudulent work.

The internationalisation of access to scientific information can multiply the benefits of national research funding. For example: "Improvements in connectivity and alternatives to internet access, such as the International Panel on Climate Change’s DVD data distribution for climate datasets, have made a difference in access to research in the developing world. But access to publication still remains problematic in nations with an emerging science base." Open access publication is one way to alleviate problems in access for developing countries.

Recommendations include the following (detailed on page 10 of the document):

• "Recommendation 1: Scientists should communicate the data they collect and the models they create, to allow free and open access, and in ways that are intelligible, assessable and usable for other specialists in the same or linked fields wherever they are in the world...
• Recommendation 2: Universities and research institutes should play a major role in supporting an open data culture...
• Recommendation 3: Assessment of university research should reward the development of open data on the same scale as journal articles and other publications, and should include measures that reward collaborative ways of working...
• Recommendation 4: Learned societies, academies and professional bodies should promote the priorities of open science amongst their members, and seek to secure financially sustainable open access to journal articles...
• Recommendation 5: Research Councils and Charities should improve the communication of research data from the projects they fund...
• Recommendation 6: As a condition of publication, scientific journals should enforce a requirement that the data on which the argument of the article depends should be accessible, assessable, usable and traceable through information in the article...
• Recommendation 7: Industry sectors and relevant regulators should work together to determine the approaches to sharing data, information and knowledge that are in the public interest...
• Recommendation 8: Governments should recognise the potential of open data and open science to enhance the excellence of the science base...
• Recommendation 9: Datasets should be managed according to a system of proportionate governance. This means that personal data is only shared if it is necessary for research with the potential for high public value...
• Recommendation 10: In relation to security and safety, good practice and common information sharing protocols based on existing commercial standards must be adopted more widely..."

Click here to access an 11-page summary of this document in PDF format.

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