Hot on the heels of last week’s International Open Access Week and the announcement of the latest round of Nobel prizes earlier this month, it felt right that this week’s TL;DR Tuesday offering should feature Nobel laureate and former President of the Royal Society, now Group Lead of the Structural Studies Division of the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Venki Ramakrishnan. In this week’s TL;DR Shorts episode, Venki talks about the opportunities and challenges of open research.
Venki is a strong supporter of open research. Most research activities undertaken across the world are funded by taxpayers or charities. Venki believes that the public and other researchers have a right to access research information generated from this work. However, he also has concerns about the potential consequences of cutting out some of the steps in more traditional publishing routes.
Venki emphasises the need for research outputs to be checked for their integrity and credibility when sharing research openly. This curation step takes time and resources and therefore costs money, so we need to find a balance between sharing research information openly, widely and without financial barriers to accessing it, while also ensuring that that research is robust and of high quality. Who should fund this?
One way the open research agenda has transformed research is through institutions and funders insisting that data sets are made more available by sharing them in open repositories. This is just one example of how culture change in research is happening, and how small steps lead to a much larger research transformation and a paradigm shift in how we do research.
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