“What does the immediate future hold in store? The implementation of open access raises an equally important aspect of science publishing in 2021 and beyond – open science. The basic premise of open science is that not only should articles be freely accessible to all, but that the primary data contained within them should also be readily available. JBC certainly adheres to this principle, in so much that JBC policy states that all primary data should be available upon request from the authors. The open science movement has gained significant traction over the last decade, and the basic tenets are that articles and data should be published in the fully open access model. Similarly, all primary data, both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’, should be deposited in publicly-accessible repositories, free to all. This is not a particularly heretical concept, after all at JBC and in many other journals, large data sets such as proteomics, RNAseq, functional genomics, and structural data must all be deposited into one of many public repositories as a condition of article acceptance. Why should this not apply to all primary data?
There are numerous ways to define the Open Science movement. One of the most illustrative is the sociologist Robert Merton’s norms from 1942, defining the ethos of science: Communality, Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized Skepticism (
2
). Communality represents the open and transparent sharing of knowledge, the basic tenet of Open Science. Universalism encompasses objective assessments where decisions are driven by data. Disinterestedness speaks to motivation, a scientist should be motivated by knowledge and discovery, which to many of us seems self-evident but in practice is often distorted because of external forces. Finally organized skepticism, where one limits bias and considers all new evidence, even against one’s prior work. After all, the basic premise of the experimental method has always been one in which scientists define a hypothesis and set out experimental approaches to disprove that hypothesis. All of these idealized norms converge, in collaboration with the scientific method, to ensure a high quality of science. I will be looking forward to discussing with the JBC community the ideals and implementation of Open Science.”
