Never a better time for open science

The scientific community responded rapidly to the crisis by releasing over 125,000 COVID-19–related articles within the first ten months following the report of the first confirmed case, of which more than 30,000 were papers posted on preprint servers. A recent study looked into the online propagation of preprints in bioRxiv and medRxiv and found an unprecedented role for them in the dissemination of COVID-19 science ¹.

Many academic journals reacted to the emergency by speeding up their peer-review processes to ensure rapid dissemination and, all major scientific publishers have opened up their subscription contents about COVID-19 and related coronaviruses.
Data-sharing initiatives have been launched to share epidemiological, clinical and genomics data. Protocols and standards used to collect data are also being shared. In Europe over 73,000 users are collaborating on the new COVID-19 data portal (set up by the European Open Science Cloud) that gathers information from clinical trials, hospitals, research centres and several national health institutes. Another example of extended sharing and collaboration is the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a free resource comprising more than 280,000 scholarly articles about the novel coronavirus created by the Allen Institute for artificial intelligence (AI), in collaboration with the US government and several firms, foundations and publishers.

Open science is also about getting ordinary citizens involved in the research process. Last year a citizen science project integrated Covid research tasks into EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Thus far, players have completed 1.37 million analysis tasks in-game, which has saved scientists 330 years’ worth of research into the immune response, IGN reported. In the midst of the health, social and economic emergency we are facing, this willingness to collaborate and share new findings sounds logical but what about other important problems that our civilization is facing, such as the climate/environmental crisis or other equally complex challenges reflected in the UN Sustainable Development Goals? We may have not yet hit a state of frantic emergency there, but scientists and scholars, including those working at Eurac Research, are going to great strides to better understand these problems and offer solutions. The idea of opening all science and research by bringing down the barriers (cultural as well as technological) that hinder the sharing of knowledge is something that has gained much momentum in the last 6 years and has reached a new acceleration under the impulse of the pandemic.

Briefly explained, open science is a vision for scientific progress that goes well beyond open access to publications, and extends openness to the whole research life cycle. It advocates for cooperation instead of competition among researchers, while also offering new ways of exchanging and disseminating knowledge using digital technologies and tools. A research project that is open by design adopts the principles of transparency, reproducibility, accessibility, and openness - from the preparatory stages through to preservation of the study materials after the project ends. This means keeping such principles in mind when planning the study, deciding on methods to acquire data, choosing tools to collaborate, and storing the research records in a way that ensures digital and physical preservation. The very definition of a research output has evolved to include data, code, workflows, protocols, hardware and everything that was necessary to reach the final results. The intermediate and final outputs of research that is open by design are shared not only within academia but with society, made available for policy makers, industry, and civil society to use.