Access to Science and Scholarship 2024

Of Interest to the Information Community

During November, the MIT Press released a comprehensive report that addresses how open access policies shape research and what is needed to maximize their positive impact on the research ecosystem.

The report, entitled “Access to Science & Scholarship 2024: Building an Evidence Base to Support the Future of Open Research Policy,” is the outcome of a National Science Foundation-funded workshop held at the D.C. headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on September 20, 2024.

While open access aims to democratize knowledge, its implementation has been a factor in the consolidation of the academic publishing industry, an explosion in published articles with inconsistent review and quality control, and new costs that may be hard for researchers and universities to bear, with less affluent schools and regions facing the greatest risk. The workshop examined how open access and other open science policies may affect research and researchers in the future, how to measure their impact, and how to address emerging challenges.

The event brought together leading experts to discuss critical issues in open scientific and scholarly publishing. These issues include:

• The impact of open access policies on the research ecosystem
• The enduring role of peer review in ensuring research quality
• The challenges and opportunities of data sharing and curation
• The evolving landscape of scholarly communications infrastructure

The report identifies key research questions in order to advance open science and scholarship. These include:

• How can we better model and anticipate the consequences of government policies on public access to science and scholarship?
• How can research funders support experimentation with new and more equitable business models for scientific publishing?
• If the dissemination of scholarship is decoupled from peer review and evaluation, who is best suited to perform that evaluation, and how should that process be managed and funded?

“This workshop report is a crucial step in building a data-driven roadmap for the future of open science publishing and policy,” said Dr. Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor and Professor of Biology Emeritus at MIT and faculty lead of the working group behind the workshop and the report. “By identifying key research questions around infrastructure, training, technology, and business models, we aim to ensure that open science practices are sustainable and that they contribute to the highest quality research.”

The full report is available for download here, along with video recordings of the workshop.

From the Executive Summary

Prioritized Questions

How can scenario modeling be used to better model and anticipate the outcomes (including unintended consequences) of science communication policy, whether as the result of new policies or changes to existing policies (e.g., what are the potential impacts of immediate Green open access policies on subscription revenues for publishers and subscription spend for universities)? Through what mechanisms can stakeholders (e.g., policy-setting bodies like governments and funders, researchers, publishers, librarians) come together for productive scenario modeling? 

2. What standardized measures are needed to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of open science policies and practices? 

3. What are the challenges and benefits of peer review, and how do they differ across disciplines, models of peer review, and types of scientific output? What evaluations are needed to assess the impact of current models of peer review, as well as new and emerging models? How effective are peer review badges (or other indicators of the level of peer review) at signaling trust for readers? What are current incentives and barriers for individual scholars to engage in peer review activities, and how might they be adjusted to better encourage and reward productive peer review?

4. What will the impact of current open science policies be on university presses and research associations/societies? For societies/associations that rely on subscription revenues to fund other activities, what new funding/business models are emerging, and how can they be assessed? Likewise, should the funding models for university presses be revisited? 

5. What are the costs to researchers and their institutions of open data policies under different implementation scenarios? How can funders and institutions ensure these costs are covered for their funded researchers? 

6. How are research data reused, what is required to make them reusable, and how does that vary from field to field? What is the differential value of data sharing and archiving depending on field of research, data types, and repurposing use cases? What policy interventions are likely to be most effective across disciplines and data types? 

7. What are the administrative burdens of open science policy (including both access to research papers and open data) compliance for researchers, and how does that differ across disciplines, output types, institutional support, etc.? What opportunities exist to mitigate and/or lower the administrative burden for individual researchers? 

8. How does the community, the general public, and the media use preprint servers? Is there trend data or other indicators that would help us predict the growth and role of preprint services over the next five years? How might the preprint publishing model evolve to meet global research dissemination demands during emergent, high-impact challenges to knowledge creation and access? What are the broader implications of decoupling dissemination from validation? 

9. What models can be developed to support the long-term maintenance, development, and innovation of scholarly communications infrastructure such as preprint servers, metadata standards, persistent identifiers, data repositories, etc.? What elements are critical to designing the shared infrastructure that will underpin scholarly communications (e.g., governance models, proprietary vs. open models)? How can we ensure that such infrastructure is financially supported such that it can continue to evolve to support science?

Please visit the Access to Science & Scholarship 2024 website for more information.