Keynote presented by Juan Pablo Alperin at the first United Nations Open Science Conference on November 19, 2019, organized by the UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

Good morning. It is a true honour to be here and have an opportunity to share with you my thoughts on policies and incentives for open science.

I will do so in 3 parts:

1. My mini-crisis as I prepared this talk
2. What open access can teach us
3. Where we go from here

 

Part 1: My mini-crisis as I prepared this talk

I obviously started by leafing through the Sustainable Development Goals… and then I started to feel that there are more pressing issues in the world than ensuring that research is shared openly. What could I say about incentivizing people to share their research openly that would be more important than asking them to take direct action towards ending poverty, tackling the climate crisis, ensuring healthy lives, making cities safe, and so on.

Asking myself this question was no small thing—I have spent the greater part of the last ten years doing a lot of work to promote open access to research! So I was up late one night thinking about what I could come here to say and I went to bed questioning my life choices. Needless to say, it was not a good sleep.

By the time I got back to working on this the next evening—I do all my best work after I put my son to bed—I had talked myself down from this brief existential crisis. I started by remembering how it is I got here: In case you didn’t know, nobody grows up dreaming of being a scholarly communications researcher. I fell into this line of work, just as everyone does, through a series of experiences that are meaningful for me. After growing up in Argentina and emigrating to Canada, I started sharing my university library passwords with my Tia Marta and my Tio Horacio. They were university professors in Argentina, but, as an undergrad, I had more access than they did. Many years later, I happened upon a job with the Public Knowledge Project, which I accepted largely because it would give me a chance to travel around the Latin America I had left behind, and, in doing so, speak to journal editors and scholars from around the region. It was then that I came to discover that my skills, experience, and perspectives were appreciated, and that this was a field where I could feel that I was doing meaningful work for a part of the world I felt connected to, but had largely left behind.

But what really got me out of my mini-crisis is that I remembered that I actually believe that open scholarship has the potential to affect all of these larger societal challenges. That is, to me, the connection between open scholarship and the Sustainable Development Goals is evident, if still somewhat nebulous. I was able to talk myself down from this existential crisis by thinking through how open scholarship practices could play a role in reinvigorating the public mission of universities and helping them become vehicles for social development along all those dimensions outlined in the SDGs. I am driven by a desire to shape open scholarship with this vision in mind, and I practice open scholarship because I fundamentally believe it to be true—not because of some incentive or policy that rewards me when I do. In addition—and this is important for the topic at hand today—I practice open scholarship despite the barriers that stand in the way of doing so.

You’ll notice that I am not saying I found motivation in terms of how open scholarship affects my own career. What I just shared with you is my story, and that story is the only incentive I need.

Part 2: What open access can teach us

As I have been researching incentives for review, promotion, and tenure in academia, I have come to believe that career incentives are far less consequential than many people make them out to be. We collected hundreds of the guidelines and documents that govern the review process in universities in the US and Canada, and I have now seen work by others that looked at Europe and Asia. All of us found the same thing: that “traditional” research outputs—things like academic articles and books—are mentioned in the vast majority of the documents. Emerging forms of scholarship—it won’t surprise you to learn—are not. Open access? Virtually non-existent. Present in the documents of only 5% of institutions, and mostly in negative terms.

Then, when we surveyed faculty about how they choose where to publish, we found that researchers are motivated first and foremost by a desire to have their work read and to find audiences for their research. But, in survey after survey carried out around the world, when researchers are asked what they consider when choosing where to submit their work, open access comes in pretty far down the list. In some surveys, it comes in last.

And yet. And yet… we have made much progress in terms of making a significant portion of the research—currently around 50% of what is published—freely available. More importantly, a recent estimate by the team at the non-profit Our Research calculated that, if we keep progressing at the current rate, in 5 years, over 70% of what people seek to read will be open access. This is huge progress. But we have achieved this without fundamentally challenging how individual researchers do their day-to-day work. We haven’t redefined the profession, and we haven’t really changed what motivates researchers. The open access incentives we put in place really only nudge scholars to go a little out of their way—mostly to deposit articles into repositories—and, even then, they’ve had quite variable success­. But, in fact, the biggest thing we have done is made open access more of a norm, and ensured that we have mechanisms in place to pay extra for those works to be available.

The lesson

So here is what I want us to consider as we think about open scholarship policies: The fact that we have largely adopted open access without fundamentally changing researchers’ motivations represents a missed opportunity.

I believe we have neglected to tackle some of the fundamental ways in which scholarship today runs in opposition to larger goals we might have as a society, including the SDGs. Or, perhaps less cynically, we have missed the opportunity to better align scholarly activities with these larger goals. Or, even less cynically still, our path for adoption of OA successfully focused on individual targets—that is, on the number of articles that are freely available—but has done less well at considering a more integrated approach that considers the many interconnections and cross-cutting ways in which open access address larger goals.

I’m not alone in this critique of the OA movement, but I think it is particularly relevant as we push for open scholarship more broadly. Samuel Moore, a lecturer in Digital Media and Communication at King’s College London, recently wrote a wonderful article in which he describes the pre-history of the OA movement, going back to the years before the OA movement was officially born with the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration. In it, he points out that: “The BOAI declaration instilled the idea that OA research can be achieved without the dominant cultures of market-based publishing needing to change.”

Moore is careful, as am I, not to blame the BOIA declaration for the models of OA that ensued. But he argues quite convincingly that the text of this foundational document is indicative—not causal—of a lack of consensus around what OA should or could achieve. He explicitly points out the “techno-solutionist tone to the declaration.” Again, without wanting to minimize the value of declaration, I think it serves as a good reference point to compare what it is that we are trying to accomplish here today, and what governments and institutions around the world are setting in motion as we push for policies that promote “Open Science.”

I repeat these points that others have made because I want to argue that we are at a similar moment now with regards to open scholarship—here I very actively resist the tendency of calling it open science, a term that is problematic in its exclusion of the humanities and of other communities who are also involved in knowledge production in various ways. If we focus on personal incentives to achieve individual openness goals like depositing data, transparency, and reproducibility, we may succeed, as with have done with OA, on meeting specific targets. But we will fail to ensure that the broader goals we hope the openness will achieve.

To better illustrate what I see as the failure of open access today, I need only point to the dominance of article process charges as the dominant model for providing access. The APC model sees journals charge a fee in order to make articles publicly available. This model trades a restriction on who is able to read with a restriction on who is able to author. With APC costs for a typical journal at somewhere over $2000 US, we are asking for more than many researchers’ monthly salaries—a sum that, in some places, is an enviable amount of money for an entire research project.

To make matters worse, we have seen that other parts of the world—notably Latin America—have embraced a model of OA that does not rely on APCs. This means that when a researcher from the Global North submits to a journal from Latin America, Latin American universities and governments cover the costs of its public availability, but when a researcher from Latin America submits to a journal in the Global North, it is again Latin American governments that need to send money to the North. The problems are more far-reaching, and they are not getting any better with initiatives like Plan S continuing to favor this model. But this offers one example of how academic journal publishing—including the open access we worked so hard to achieve—continues to reinforce global inequalities in ways that are very much contrary to the spirit and substance of the SDGs.

Part 3: Where we go from here

So where do we go from here? Fortunately, there are those who are already calling for a broader, more integrated approach to open scholarship. I am encouraged by the work of the Open and Collaborative Science Development Network (OCSDNet), which released a manifesto that calls for: 1) an expansion of the term open science to open and collaborative science, and 2) a model of open and collaborative science that seriously considers cognitive justice, equitable collaboration, inclusive infrastructures, sustainable development, and a paradigm OCSDNet describes as “situated openness.” I believe their work should serve as a starting point for any policy framework that seeks to promote openness.

I can also point to the Panama Declaration on Open Science, made by an ad-hoc group of advocates and civil society organizations. It adopts some of the principles of the OCSDNet manifesto and describes a need to consider a holistic approach to open science that includes participation from citizens and civil society organizations, among others.

Thinking more broadly means, at least to me, that open scholarship policies can grapple with the fact that academia is still plagued with issues of inequality and discrimination—based on race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and more—and then, on top of that, epistemological discrimination. This inequality flows through academia. It extends beyond its bounds to the public it is supposed to serve. It extends across institutions, and certainly across countries. We can see it in how resources are allocated, whose knowledge is privileged, what type of work is welcome, and who is even allowed to participate—as in the case of APCs.

So, I propose that, just as the drafters of the SDGs resisted disentangling the goals and targets from each other and instead emphasized that the need to consider their interconnections, so must we—proponents of open scholarship—resist separating out the issues plaguing academia from the goals of open scholarship itself.

At the very least, policies pushing for greater open scholarship need to be careful to avoid deepening historical and structural power structures that—and here I am quoting Leslie Chan, one of the original signatories of the BOAI Declaration—“positioned former colonial masters as the centres of knowledge production, while relegating former colonies to peripheral roles, largely as suppliers of raw data.”

I hope that seeing how things have panned out with open access can offer us some guidance here. In some sense, it is great to have had that learning opportunity, because the opportunity for open scholarship is far greater than it ever was for open access. Open scholarship is a mode of thinking and working that lends itself well to addressing the global politics of knowledge production, and the historical exclusion and marginalization of diverse perspectives. It offers us the opportunity to change in thinking about more than just how and where we publish our work. However, I’m sorry to tell those of you who are looking for a quick solution, that it will certainly require more than adding a few carrots for researchers to count and measure how “open” they are.

Here, please forgive a lengthy quote from Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book Generous Thinking, where she says: “All those analytics lead us back to the cycle we’re currently trapped in: competition, austerity, increasing privatization, and a growing divide between the university and the public it is meant to serve. Breaking that cycle and establishing a new mode of both thinking and structuring the role of the university in contemporary culture requires nothing short of a paradigm shift.” She goes on to add: “What I am arguing for is thus not a disruption but a revolution in our thinking, one specifically focused on demanding the good that higher education can create.”

Okay, with my time almost up, or possibly already over, allow me to close by bringing it back to the incentives and motivations that I started with. Perhaps I am too naïve or optimistic, but I fundamentally believe that the people who go into this line of work—myself included—are already on board with the notion of serving the public good. Policies and incentives might encourage us to share our work more broadly and can help nudge us along to specific practices, but they will never be our guiding force. That is, I don’t think we should be worried about incentivizing scholars to want to serve society. But we do need to make policies that transform the role of the university so that serving the public good is first and foremost on the minds of faculty, and serves as a compass guiding how they work.

This change is not just one that universities need to make. It also requires that the infrastructures, organizations, and societies around our universities shift their priorities and expectations of the role of scholarship.

As we think about what open scholarship policies we want, we need to do far more than support the targets laid out in the SDGs. We need to craft policies that put the university and scholarship in direct service to society again. Doing so will directly address all of the SDG goals.

Are you ready to take up the challenge?