Why Open Science Matters: how the Barcelona Declaration makes research more impactful
Maastricht University champions Open Science. With the signing of the Barcelona Declaration during the Open Science Festival Limburg, UM pushes for greater openness, autonomy, and collaboration to make research more accessible, trustworthy, and impactful. Dennie Hebels and Carien Hilvering explain why Open Science and research information are so important.
Open Science is about making science open — very much as the name would suggest. “This goes well beyond just making the published papers openly accessible,” explains Open Science Officer Dennie Hebels. “It also applies to research data, software, infrastructure or educational materials.” The advantages of more openness towards other researchers is obvious: it helps accelerate science by sharing knowledge openly and thus prevents wasting resources. “You don’t want two groups doing the same or similar research without being aware of each other’s efforts. This costs us billions every year.”
For that reason, it is important to make research and the data around it findable and accessible. Even if that research has been unsuccessful, it can still help others to avoid arduously going down the same dead-end. “That’s also why meta-data — basically data about the data — is so important: it allows researchers to find the open research (and education) outputs in the first place.”
In addition to promoting things like impact, transparency, reproducibility, collaboration, inclusivity, and accelerated discovery, Open Science is also about serving civic society. “It’s also for your neighbour and your grandma. After all, their taxes helped pay for all this research.” Hebels stresses: “It creates trust in the scientific process, knowing that you could double-check the research easily and freely does make a difference.”.
Who makes money from science?
One thing standing in the way of this open utopia is economics. Until the advent of Open Science as an idea, the results of successful, peer-reviewed research were locked away behind the paywalls of some phenomenally wealthy academic publishers. Elsevier and Springer Nature have a combined annual revenue of around €5 billion. It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that most of the research published in their journals is tax-payer financed: it’s conducted at public universities and supported by public grants, such as Horizon Europe.
According to Hebels, the biggest shift towards Open Science was caused by funders, in particular the EU, insisting on Open Access publication of results and, increasingly, data, in order to circumnavigate paywalls. “UM now has an Open Access percentage of around 90; other Dutch universities boast similar numbers.” Still, researchers end up paying an article processing fee to academic journals to make their publications Open Access. “It doesn’t really feel right that so much tax-payer money would end up with the shareholders of these publishers, so there has been a movement toward ‘Diamond Open Access’, which involves universities, institutes, and institutions publishing themselves and covering all the costs, from peer-reviews to hosting.”
Dennie Hebels is the Open Science Officer at the Maastricht University Library. He is also the Open Science Ambassador at FHML and project manager at MERLN, where he serves as data steward and coordinates MERLN’s data management activities.
Cultural shift: Recognition & Rewards
What journals have traditionally provided is prestige, and thus, career advancement. However, the journal impact factor isn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of quality — or, ironically enough, impact. Open Access allows the research to reach infinitely more people; “that should be the main motivator to publish, rather than an arguably misleading impact factor.”
The pandemic provided a common goal and briefly changed the incentive structure: it accelerated open and collaborative practices, including rapid data sharing — and science progressed much faster as a result. However, current incentive structures do not always sufficiently recognise openness and accessibility in research evaluation.
“That’s why, several years ago, Dutch universities decided to move away from evaluating researchers on impact factor and the number of publications.” The still developing Recognition & Rewards framework represents a shift towards a more qualitative view: “We now take into consideration research quality, societal impact, but also teaching, outreach, collaboration, and so on.”
Carien Hilvering is information specialist at the Maastricht University Library. She is part of Library’s Research Support & Development team and team leader of the Research Intelligence team and the Current Research Information System (CRIS) team.
Barcelona declaration
This cultural shift needs collaboration and competing parties committing across the board. The Barcelona Declaration — not in fact a commitment to tiny, technically gifted midfielders, but an international initiative that calls for greater transparency, openness, and inclusivity in the way research information is created, shared, and used — promotes a shift away from closed, proprietary systems, towards open infrastructures that better support the values of Open Science.
“We had the chance to sign the declaration when it was launched but passed it by because we felt it was symbolic, more than anything,” explains Carien Hilvering, team lead of UM’s research information system & research intelligence team. After subscribing to and implementing systems to monitor open research information, UM’s Open Science community feel they can structurally comply with the spirit of the declaration. The signing will take place during the Limburg Open Science Festival, which is organised in collaboration with Open Science Community Parkstad.
Research information
“UM is at the cutting edge of Open Science,” Hilvering points out. “Signing the Barcelona Declaration is another big step; since research information is very important.” Research information is a series of unique identifiers as well as connections to data sets and citations; it is a way of finding and accessing research and understanding its impact, also beyond academia. “Research output has grown exponentially over the last decade, and most of it is not read by anyone — the metadata is crucial.”
UM has a research information system called Pure, provided by Elsevier, which harvests research information from closed as well as open sources, such as Scopus, PubMed or Web of Science. “The organisations behind databases do a great job gathering all the information, from data sets, to citations, to public engagement — all things that are important for Open Science and Recognition & Rewards.” Hilvering adds that publishers like Elsevier involved universities in the development of these features to suit their needs. “That was great — however, they then also asked a lot of money for it.”
Greater autonomy and openness
The business model is to sell universities the ability to harvest their own research information. Having one’s research found is by no means trivial — it is the basis for collaboration and, again, individual success. “Once the discussion around Open Access publishing started, academic publishers realised that the research information isn’t well protected,” explains Hilvering. “They increased the costs for downloading research information in bulk from their databases; once universities moved to use alternative (open) sources for part of the research information, they generated specific identifiers and made them essential for linking it to the basic research information. We need to push the use of standard identifiers in order to make us autonomous in our choice of data providers.”
UM invested in more development capacity, with a view to doing more of the data harvesting themselves, and committed to a partner subscription with the open database OpenAlex, thus creating an ever better infrastructure that allows researchers to move towards openness. Celebrating the progress of UM’s Open Science community with the signing of the Barcelona Declaration is another step towards not only making science more open but also more accessible, and thus useful to a broader public.
Text: Florian Raith
“UM is at the cutting edge of Open Science.”
Carien Hilvering
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