How LERU is responding to the
Challenges and Opportunities
of Open Science (Science 2.0)
0. Overview
This paper summarizes the position of the Vice-Rectors Research in LERU universities on the topic of
Science 2.0 and suggests areas in which LERU might undertake development activity.
1. The nature of Science 2.0
There is little real understanding amongst researchers as to what Science 2.0 means in practice. In its
broadest sense, Science 2.0 is an umbrella term for a series of movements in research – which
include Open Access to publications, Open data, data-driven Science, so-called Citizen science,
Altmetrics and similar metrics, new forms of peer review, and a greater transparency and openness
in research methods and evaluation. All these concepts, when brought together, help (it is claimed)
to support a new way of doing, disseminating and evaluating research.
2. Policy positions
The Vice-Rectors have considered what policy position, if any, bodies such as the European
Commission (EC) and research universities should take on Science 2.0. In areas such as Open Access
to research publications, individual universities, research funders and European Member States have
already taken a policy position. Some of these policies, for example the Finch Report in the UK
favouring the Gold route for Open Access, have been very widely debated. Some research funders,
for example the EPSRC in the UK, have also issued policy requirements for research data
management which are a challenge for universities and individual researchers/research groups to
implement.
It is probably too early for the EC or universities to issue policy requirements for Science 2.0. Too
much is unknown or not fully understood. Rather than policy papers, the best thing that the EC could
do is to make funding available via funding programmes like Horizon 2020 to facilitate and to raise
awareness of Science 2.0 activities, positions and possibilities. Universities should work with the EC
in this way, rather than respond to or create premature policy statements.
3. Science 2.0 and the research community
Elements of Science 2.0 clearly have great value for the research community. It could represent a
revolution in the way research is pursued, how results are made open and available, and how
researchers interact with each other. Science 2.0 is nothing if not collaborative, but there is generally
a serious lack of collaborative infrastructures in Europe to take this form of intense synergy forward.
There are, however, some notable exceptions. Open Access works in the High Energy Physics (HEP)
community, for example, because HEP scientists are a close-knit, global community. They have
instigated the SCOAP3 consortium for the migration of subscription HEP journals to OA journals. The
same is not necessarily true of other research communities. For Science 2.0 to succeed, a greater
clarity is needed of what “Science 2.0” means in reality, linked with an identification of the benefits
and challenges that Science 2.0 approaches bring. The concept needs to be better known and
understood amongst the research community in order for researchers fully to engage.
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Culture change is slow to become embedded, and does not happen overnight. Once the concept of
Science 2.0 is better understood, it is possible that researchers may begin to change their behaviours
and the way they conduct and disseminate their research. This will take resources – time, staff and
money:
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Time, in order for the new approaches advocated by supporters of Science 2.0 to become
embedded in the research community
Staff, in order to offer support services to advocate Science 2.0 approaches, and to train
researchers, particularly early career researchers, in new techniques and approaches
Money, to build new infrastructure for digital curation and long-term archiving, ideally as
collaborative enterprises between universities
Such required outcomes are not best achieved by funders or universities issuing top-down policy
requirements and mandates with which researchers have to comply. Such change is a process, not
an event.
4. Open Access to Publications
Open Access to research publications is one of the best known features of Science 2.0 approaches.
LERU took an early stand on Open Access by issuing a Roadmap as an advice paper, which showed
that LERU universities were much more comfortable with Green Open Access rather than Gold,
largely because of the current existing uncertainty of the viability of the Gold option. LERU
recognised that culture change was needed in the research community in order fully to embrace the
benefits of Open Access. Such culture change may not be best served by issuing edicts, although we
note that within the UK, Research and Funding Councils have recently imposed OA requirements on
researchers. The same is true for EU-funded research and for Switzerland. The impact of this
“experiment” has yet to be evaluated. The LERU Roadmap is an Advice paper to support universities
and researchers in the various stages of their journey towards embracing Open Access principles. As
a result, some LERU universities like the University of Barcelona are “experimenting” with OA funds.
We suggest that Advice instead of Policy papers is a good model for advocating the benefits of
Science 2.0 more widely.
5. Open research data
Fundamental to Science 2.0 is the concept of research data management.
In January 2014, LERU issued a Roadmap for research data management. Issues around research
data are complex, expensive to solve, and there is a huge amount of advocacy to be done in the
research community to instil best practice for research data management techniques. Yet, datadriven Science is a fundamental building block of the openness and transparency around which
Science 2.0 approaches are built. It represents an enormous challenge for research universities; both
international collaborations and global funding streams will be needed successfully to embed
research data infrastructures and practices into research communities.
Open Data forms part of the discussion around research data management. The benefits of an Open
approach to research data are spelled out in the Royal Society’s Report Science as an Open
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Enterprise. In order to tackle the challenges facing human society – for example in health or global
warming – the sharing of research data across national boundaries would do much to speed up new
discoveries and new forms of treatment. Not all research data can be Open – there are security and
data protection issues around certain types of data. The LERU Roadmap for Research Data discusses
this question, but clearly more debate is needed before the research community can come to a
shared view on what sorts of data can indeed be Open. There are other key issues: the importance
of sharing (in this case related to data) in this new behaviours associated with Science 2.0 and the
need to establish a reward system for those whose share, by means of citations, to gain recognition.
6. Citizen Science
In some subject areas, Citizen Science has already become established. Galaxy Zoo is an example of
such an approach. Galaxy Zoo is an online astronomy project which invites people to assist in the
morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it
enlists the help of members of the public to help in scientific research. The fourth and current
version of Galaxy Zoo was launched in summer 2012, incorporating new images of the Sloan galaxies
and images from Hubble's CANDELS survey. Galaxy Zoo is part of the Zooniverse group of citizen
science projects.
In the Arts and Humanities, crowd sourcing the transcription of manuscripts and archival material is
another example of Citizen Science. The Bentham project in UCL (University College London) has
crowd sourced the transcription of many items from the archival collections of Jeremy Bentham, the
nineteenth century utilitarian philosopher, to great effect.
There are many other projects on Citizen Science. At the European level:
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Socientize - http://www.socientize.eu/
Crowdcrafting - http://crowdcrafting.org/
Also, it is worth mentioning the support that the city of Barcelona is offering to these kinds of
projects with the creation of the Citizen Science Office
(http://www.barcelonalab.cat/ca/projectes/oficina-ciencia-ciutadana/), with the collaboration of
the universities and their researchers
Public understanding of and trust in science are important and, in this respect, relying on Citizen
Science approaches may be limiting. It may not be axiomatic that Citizen Science will work in all
subject areas. Universities need to think what their role in supporting and fostering citizen science
can/should be. Is this a major new form of public engagement? Is the research which results from
the involvement of citizen scientists robust and trustworthy? The EC could help by brokering
discussions and collaborations to take the debate forward.
7. Metrics
One of the fundamental features of Science 2.0 is advocacy for greater openness in research
methods and evaluation. This can be seen in its approach to metrics as a tool for evaluating quality
and excellence in research outputs.
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The San Francisco Declaration on research Assessment has issued a bold call for a re-evaluation of
how research outputs are assessed. A fundamental part of that document is a call that Impact
Factors (IFs) should not be used in research assessment, since IFs refer to the journal as whole, and
not to the individual article or research output. Such a move away from reliance on IFs would
represent a fundamental change in how research is evaluated.
When discussing metrics, it is essential to understand their limitations and value (if any), also when
they are applicable and when they are invalid or misleading. Recently other, alternative, metrics
(Altmetrics) have been developed, but the Altmetric community itself is unsure what the correct
metric should be and the approach has attracted much criticism. Likewise, in the future the number
of downloads of a work will doubtless be used as a metric, but it is difficult to aggregate download
statistics from all the possible digital sources where a research output could exist. Citation counts
are possible, but the nature of publishing styles and output presentation means that citations data
are not readily obtained for much work in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Generally, there is considerable uncertainty whether metrics should be used or can be used at all as
a proxy for quality. It is important that governments (and HEI managers) stop thinking that metrics
are an end in their own right. Universities need to set the agenda by deciding whether metrics are
important and, if so, which metrics are relevant and under what circumstances.
8. Peer review
Peer review is seen both as the acme of academic research evaluation and also one of the most
enduring challenges in the current scholarly communications system. Alternatives to the traditional
method of double blind peer review need urgently to be investigated.
Open Access journals, such as those produced by PLoS (Public Library of Science), have adopted a
light touch peer review, where only the soundness of the general methodology and the ability of the
article to justify its findings are used as criteria for deciding whether to publish a paper.
Alternatively, some innovators argue that the time of traditional models of peer review is over. The
greater transparency of Science 2.0 approaches would dictate that this openness in attributing
review to named individuals is desirable. Instead, journals can rely on post-publication peer review
by the community, using (moderated) social media where appropriate. However, studies have found
that post-publication peer review is not popular, with contributors to reviews often unwilling to
assign their name in public to a review. Peerage of Science (http://www.peerageofscience.org/) is
new a tool and a service which provides novel solutions for the peer review process. As such it is an
example of new, innovative ways to answer the questions related to peer review in science 2.0.
9. Public/Private partnerships
For researchers who deal with research data that may have privacy or ethical implications, there is
reluctance to share the data with commercial entities, or to enter into contracts with them for the
curation and storage of that data. This is due to concern over privacy issues, and questions over
whether it is ethical to enter into public/private partnerships for this sort of data. A related issue
concerns legal jurisdictions in which contract disputes would be dealt with. For cloud-based services,
which legal jurisdiction will a private company be willing to use for dispute resolution with the
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customer? It is highly unlikely that companies would allow any jurisdiction to be used. This
uncertainty already acts as a barrier to the take-up of cloud-based services.
Universities are more likely to feel comfortable purchasing services from non-profit ventures, or to
enter into non-profit collaborations with other universities. A good example is a new national data
centre established as a collaborative facility in the UK for 6 six scientific and academic organisations,
run by the JISC as a trusted third party.
The model for future e-infrastructures for research data management is a key issue in the Science
2.0 debate and needs further elaboration.
10. Reward structures
To change the culture in research communities, reward structures have to be linked to research
practice. Traditional publication routes for research, often in the context of national research
evaluation exercises, are channels for public recognition and an individual’s promotion. However,
many of the aspects of Science 2.0 do not accrue recognition or opportunities for such promotion.
Universities do not traditionally reward researchers for sharing their data or for engaging in digital
curation activities that ensure that their research data are curated for the longer term. Without new
incentives and reward structures, the benefits of Science 2.0 will go unheeded in European
universities because research career structures do not currently recognise success in these emerging
areas of research practice.
11. Research Training
Science 2.0 has implications for how early career researchers should be trained. However, there is a
lack of awareness amongst some policy makers, research funders and universities as to what the
modern curriculum for research training should look like. The January 2014 LERU Advice Paper on
Doctoral Training, for example, is silent on research data management and the benefits to research
of Open research data – one of the main pillars of Science 2.0. There is a need in the research
community for debate and agreement on what the requirements are for doctoral training
programmes, fully to realise the benefits of Science 2.0.
12. Next Steps
This paper acknowledges that the concept of Science 2.0 is little understood in European universities
and that a fundamental cultural change is needed if research communities are to embrace the
benefits that Science 2.0 may bring.
LERU universities should work with the EC in a number of areas to progress the debate. LERU should:
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Establish a series of pan-European Workshops to investigate the various elements which
make up Science 2.0. The LERU Seminar on Open Scholarship in Brussels on 6 June 2014, in
conjunction with the European Commission, is an example of such an activity. The June 2014
Seminar has been organised by the LERU Community of Chief Information Officers
Seek funding from the EC to set up pan-European advocacy/research programmes on the
potential benefits and challenges of Science 2.0 approaches
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Open data is a fundamental building block of Science 2.0. Universities should bid for a
collaborative project under the Horizon 2020 Research Data pilot to construct the necessary
European infrastructure and to advocate Open Science approaches to research data
management in research universities across Europe
The other elements of the Science 2.0 portfolio are less mature or well defined. These need
to be monitored, but it is probably too early to develop detailed advice on them at this stage.
David Price
Paul Ayris
24 March 2014; rev. 1 and 5 June 2014; 7, 9 and 19 September 2014
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