Advancing Research Openness and Responsibility

At Digital Science, we believe that many of the different aspects of research need to be shared as openly as possible. Openness in research has the capacity to improve both research itself and its long-term societal impact. Of course, the research ecosystem is not simple – data privacy and many other factors need to be considered but, broadly, getting the most useful findings into the right hands with the lowest possible barriers to reuse and further development is in everyone’s interest. These principles lie at the heart of openness – they are what can make research beneficial to humanity as a whole. Open research is not just about Open Access. It aims to promote transparency throughout the research lifecycle: from funding, through research methodology and data sharing, to evaluation and impact. It is also a key tenet of a healthy research culture that is open to, and supportive of, all people and ideas; a global community where knowledge is shared freely.

In recent years, a reproducibility crisis has arisen in the research community. The key to ensuring all research is reproducible is to document and report details of methods, equipment, analytical software, and data as accurately and openly as possible. While it is up to researchers to ensure that happens, we know that the burden of implementing a workflow that allows research to be tracked and documented in a transparent way can be costly and complex. Our focus is to support the community on their path to openness by developing and implementing elegant and interoperable technological solutions.