Science used to be a mysterious and exclusive realm, accessible only to a select few who possessed the necessary tools for research. However, the advent of the digital era has transformed this landscape, granting unprecedented access to knowledge for everyone. In this new era, open science has emerged as a powerful movement, aiming to make scientific research, data, and methodologies freely available to the public. What are the benefits, challenges, and future prospects of open science?
Origins of open science
Open science has never been more popular than today, with all the necessary tools available to everyone in a digital form. Yet, the concept of open science is not a modern idea, as it dates back to the 16th century, when mostly thanks to the Royal Society, experiments presented in the scholarly articles were then repeated by scientists from around the world.
The 16th and 17th centuries were the times of a shift from secrecy to disclosure of knowledge, which was the first step on the route to open science. The second revolution took place hundreds of years later and was possible due to the increasing number of people using the Internet. New practices appeared that were alternative to traditional publications, for example, preprints, microblogs, blogs, wiki pages, social media, or living reviews.
The change allows the scientists to present incomplete results, ask for discussion, and do more collaborative research. Negative results appear, as a form of warning to other scientists not to make the same mistakes.
Open science tools and domains
The first domain to talk about is open access, which grants free of charge access to articles. It’s not only possible to read the paper, but also to download, copy, distribute, or print it. It may be surprising, but the access is not limited by any financial, legal, or technical barriers.
Another fundamental component of open science is open data, which may be defined as the practice of making research data openly available to the public, including experimental results, survey responses, genomic sequences, and more.
Open metrics refer to the transparent measurement and evaluation of research outputs and impact. Instead of using simply journal impact factors, citation counts, and h-index, open science introduced data sets, software, preprints, and open education resources.
Open peer review has various options, generally based on the idea that anyone from the scientific industry may become a reviewer. Either the author and reviewers get to know during the review process, the review is published along with the article, or the paper is reviewed by volunteers from the scientific community.
Benefits and risks of open science
There are a few positive aspects of open science, starting with accelerated discovery, enhanced transparency and reproducibility, collaboration and interdisciplinary research, accessible knowledge, efficient resource allocation, and increased public engagement.
The long list of benefits of open science doesn’t mean that there are no disadvantages of such a solution, for example, possible issues with data privacy and security, quality control, and predatory practices, the risk of misinterpretation and misuse of research, and inequality and access disparities.
Even though there are not only benefits of open science popularity, it’s still really important that the concept grows constantly, giving us even more chances of inventions, and new creations.
