Rebranding Open Science from moral arguments to an efficient practice

10.5281/zenodo.17340422 Classified as | Public - Publiek (Openbaar) Rebranding Open Science from moral arguments to an e6icient practice Ari Asmi https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3933-4684 Reilutiede Ltd (Helsinki, Finland), TU Delft Library (Delft, the Netherlands), Leiden University Libraries (Leiden, the Netherlands) The opinions presented here are personal opinions of the author, and do not necessarily present the institutional opinions or policies of the organisations he is involved in. This document was published in LinkedIn, this version is a pre-print for archiving, preservation, and wider access. Most people agree that Open Science (OS) has significant advantages for research processes, it makes results more impactful, improves transfer of scientific information, reduces duplication and increases quality and e>iciency of the research processes. However, the sales pitch for Open Science is not clearly as appealing for all researchers. Most of the OS advantages are benefits for the society and science, with long time scales and with a wide but vague impact. In contrast, the work to be done – curation of data and software, fitting to existing standards and finding the correct terms from obscure ontologies - is current, local and directly time and resource consuming. This post discusses some thoughts on how Open Science is generally presented to scientists, and some results from an unconference discussion on this subject during TDC-NES retreat in August. Moral Morass Open Science is traditionally presented as a moral requirement for researchers. Slogans such as “open science is science done right!”, calculations of wasted resources on duplication of e>orts, or references to the plight of Loweror MiddleIncome Countries researchers to access research data - are all good arguments for Open Science, but their e>icacy depends a lot on interest in public good, values, ambitions and personality of the researchers who do actually have to do most of the work for the Open Science. Even in the cases these arguments find a good ground, the researcher might not be high enough in their Maslow hierarchy to a>ord to consider such altruistic acts. Changes in life situation, lack of job security, upcoming tenure evaluations and funding cuts - overall uncertainty of modern research act as strong incentives to concentrate on immediate challenges, meeting existing metrics, and working on concrete short-term 10.5281/zenodo.17340422 Classified as | Public - Publiek (Openbaar) goals. Using time to anything else than the measured activities (=producing research papers), does not directly benefit researcher career prospects. This concentration on moral messaging creates also a type of a moral quandary. Unsurprisingly, the people who are most responding to the moral arguments also are the ones most likely to act accordingly. As this takes some time from producing measured results (papers) as their peers, they could be (as a statistical hypothesis) disadvantaged against their peers. The underlaying pressure of resource distribution do seem to push the career equilibrium of researcher career progression away from the Open Science activities, unless there are strong outside forces to counteract this flow. When I started to work on Open Science more than a decade ago, I optimistically used to joke that “Open Science advances at the rate of retirement”, I am not that sure anymore. The replacements might be just from the same mould. The thermodynamics of tenure are still against Open Science. Carrots and sticks (might) motivate The variable e>icacy of the moral argument is not a new observation, and there has been from the beginning a lot of development of other kinds of encouragements towards OS activities. Most of these could be categorised between Sticks (force) and Carrots (incentives). Traditionally, the main policy weapon has been the Stick: Do this (OS) or otherwise you will not get funded (or get fired). This works at least in the surface: policies of NWO, European Commission and other public funders have done tremendous change in the usage of Data Management Plans and on Open Access publishing. Similarly, some universities have started to require PhD students to deposit their research data to accepted locations, and similar policies for research software are on the way. The Stick is an easy way, but it is also a blunt instrument. Some researchers respond by doing the very minimum, some start to resent the whole idea from principle. A level of forcing seems to be necessary however, to at least make complete freeloading less likely (reducing moral hazard mentioned above). To be honest, there are hardly ever any follow up on any DMPs or e>ective quality checks of the submitted data. Thus, the usability of the submitted outputs can be questionable, unless more specific methods, Image created with Bing Image creator 10.5281/zenodo.17340422 Classified as | Public - Publiek (Openbaar) such as Reproducibility Check1 can be used in large scale. Future will tell, but just using the Stick will work as it get you what it always does: Bare minimum to avoid getting hit, and definitely no love. The Carrot should be a much better motivator. All kinds of committees work on Open Science related indicators, develop data citations metrics, or create diamond open access publications. As these do not yet impact the actual tenure decisions, these carrots are, however, not yet very tasty for the researchers. This academic “carrot growing” is also like agriculture in more ways than one, it takes a lot of work and harvest does not come immediately. Like in any agriculture, there is need to fertilise with constant communication, and pests and political weather to consider. Indeed, anyone who has worked on international science policy, especially on a field with a lot of economic, political and competitiveness aspects will know that this is not going to be solved next Tuesday. To be able to provide these treats for the researchers, one needs to also convince that the research organizations are to be measured with the same metrics. This in turn needs a change in highest levels of national university funding – a touchy subject at best. Selecting a brand of incentives can create quite a lot of intended and nonintended consequences. We could end up in another incentive spiral, leading to another way the science is gamified and played with, putting us are back in the starting point. Not only is this a slow process, but perhaps it really should be. One should also remember that a large part of the current leadership in faculties have got where there are by following the current metrics and models. Convincing all of them on the benefits of the new agriculture might need some quite advanced proselytization and a strong policy push from national funding sources. The Third Way is very well known by the people working in research support. A large part of the immediate advantages of the Open Research is on the adoption of practices needed for it, not the openness itself. On short-to-medium term, good practices of data management, software version control repository, and documentation do help the researcher and their research group. Opening your data and methods is also a good way to be known in the field and could be advancing the field in general (esp. in comparison to other fields, competing from the same resources). Data and software management skills are also in high demand in industries – potentially exciting opportunity for PhD students at least. In all fairness, these advantages are communicated to the researchers, at least after they come to research data or software management training, but the initial communication of Open Science is not usually targeting these aspects. 1 https://www.tudelft.nl/digital-competence-centre/services/reproducibility-check 10.5281/zenodo.17340422 Classified as | Public - Publiek (Openbaar) Donkeys working to grow their own carrots. Picture © Valdavia CC BY-SA 3.0 We need more thought on what kind of messaging we use for Open Science and its methods, adjusting the message on the needs and situations the researchers are living in. Massaging the messaging I participated recently TDC NES Col-lab retreat in Schoorl, Holland. Organized in unconference format, one of the group discussions concentrated on this very aspect: How to create eDective communication for the scientists who do not respond well to the morality-based Open Science arguments or “Rebranding Open Science” (link to the group repository). This was teamwork, and any conclusions in there are inspired by the work of all participants, although based on my own interpretation and interests2. As usual for an unconference-style events, the work was based on very loose schedule and workplan, adjusting over the whole event. Some of the members of the NES COLLAB group working on this: J. Carillo, C., Greene, A. Asmi (author of this text), J. Cupać and I. Patarcic. Other contributors (not pictured): S. Tshirpke (foto © ) ,Y. Huang, and M. Imming 2 I take responsibility but not credit! 10.5281/zenodo.17340422 Classified as | Public - Publiek (Openbaar) The three days of conversations bought up many things worth of mentioning in this context: - Di>erent career stages, and professional and personal goals significantly impact the responding to Open Science arguments. - Approaching with the wrong kinds of arguments can lead to indi>erence, deprioritization or even rejection of the Open Science activities. - Not everyone responds well to ready-made solutions or advocacy. Listening to challenges and interests and providing examples where Open Science practices have been successful in similar cases might lead to own recognition of the benefits, and creation of own processes which are more adaptable for the situation. Sometimes it is necessary only to set the idea and let it grow. - Many researchers have started their careers highly motivated with common good and advance of science. However, the current systems pressure them on time and resources to concentrate on short term goals and using moral arguments can lead to cases of dissonance between the initial values and goals and the external pressures. In these conditions, arguments for morality might be seen as more stressful than helpful and lead even to demotivation. Considering the pragmatic situation of their daily life is also important consideration for communicating with them and adjusting messaging to more concrete and easyto-achieve goals might be more suitable for that career phase. - It would be useful to train people communicating with researchers, such as library support sta> and faculty data stewards, on identifying di>erent motivators of the researchers. This information could then be used to select good examples, arguments, slogans, or discussion points, which are more e>ective in changing behaviour towards Open Science practices. - It is crucial to collect good examples of use cases from di>erent fields and career phases on practical advantages what researchers have gained from Open Science would be extremely useful. Finding cases where e.g. PhD student was employed due to their published software, a Post Doc got famous due to their outstanding published dataset or a research group got extremely e>icient due to well managed (and open) scientific workflow, could be good examples to indirectly present the benefits for the researchers. Overall, it seems that communicating with researchers would need much more targetspecific thinking and responding with arguments and storylines which interest the values of the researcher in question and responds to their current needs. Particular personas We then investigated these aspects by building three personas to explore how the career stage and other boundary conditions a>ect the personal goals and needs of the scientists. The personas were analysed on their ambitions, challenges, motivators and 10.5281/zenodo.17340422 Classified as | Public - Publiek (Openbaar) potential needs which Open Science practices could be a good match. This work involved adding features to these personas, based on the personal experiences of the participants, and showing up much of the experiences what the group have collected in the work. Personas created in the workshop These were - like many such examples are - caricatures but are illustrative already on the diversity of potential communication methods needed. They were also a good way to start the conversation and get di>erent points on the needed communication methods. It could be very interesting to further explore these kinds of personas, e.g. by further elaboration with existing experiences of support sta> and using more developed personas such as the ones developed in Utrecht University’s Faces of Open Science project. One could also expand further on other types of needs and incentives more related to (research) group cultures and belongingness. Manipulation, marketing or motivation? One interesting discussion point was raised on the morality of this exercise. Is this not manipulation of researchers? Is this the task of the support personnel to find ways to indirectly influence the research sta> to do “their bidding”? Are we trying to use some sort of subliminal messaging to change behaviour? Is this our work? Does the goal justify the means? 10.5281/zenodo.17340422 Classified as | Public - Publiek (Openbaar) Personally, I think this is more of a marketing issue, and not any more manipulation than using di>erent slogans in di>erent countries when selling soda or changing the scientific terminology to more general when presenting about climate change to the public. Science communication also includes communicating to scientists, and the to me this is not any di>erent than any other reason to communicate issues which need actions. Successful messaging needs to adjust to the needs of the target audiences, and I think that support personnel should be trained to identify these needs, and to use appropriate messaging, channels and terminology to achieve this. This is not an issue of manipulation, but to find the relevant message for the recipient. Perhaps we need more systematic approach to Open Science communication? Market research for Open Science?