Open and healthy research cultures: bringing insights into policy and practice

In the last twenty years, "open" has become a prominent buzzword in science. Many movements supporting open science have arisen within communities of researchers and overlapping groups interested in Web technology and research communication. Open science has also become a top-down policy agenda.

Many governments, research funders, universities, and publishers worldwide now ask or insist that researchers adopt "open" practices. Open practices and concepts are diverse. Two of the most prominent are open access and open data, which entail free, unrestricted online access to published research findings, and to underlying datasets, respectively.

More ambitious visions of open science evoke "revolution", and press for online transparency of entire research processes including plans, methods, and real-time results. Open science is sometimes characterised simply as "good science". Yet, many scientists do not seem to understand open science in the same way as its advocates, and seem slow or ambivalent in their uptake of open practices.

In my PhD research, I investigated interesting social features of open science. I began in historical contexts, tracing traditional ideals of scientific openness, and the roots of today's open science movements. I also examined present-day policy and advocacy documents, to make sense of current meanings of "open".

This provided context for an interview study with 40 biological scientists and 14 advocates or policymakers about their understandings of openness in science. These were mainly based in the UK and Australia. The most prominent "openness" topics for scientists were open access, data openness, and interpersonal openness.

The last of these topics is not part of today's open science movements - and is not an online practice - but has special importance to many of the scientists interviewed. Interpersonal openness showed how some scientists occupy research cultures in which they feel free to behave in open and collaborative ways, and others feel constricted in their openness: vulnerable to factors like competition, career insecurity, a lack of social support, or loss of trust in their research community.

These insights are useful for national-level UK policy organisations that hope to promote open science and healthy research culture from the top down. They are also useful for grassroots initiatives embracing open science, which hope to engage with a broader group of researchers. Moreover, these insights show how certain kinds of social support within research communities can build a foundation for more open and healthier research cultures: cultures in which fewer researchers feel vulnerable and inhibited about sharing openly.

In this Fellowship, I am building links with both policy and grassroots groups with the aim of supporting openness and healthy research cultures from both the top-down and the bottom-up. I am also developing experimental interventions (via a workshop and discussion group) that directly support these improvements to research culture. I will also share and consolidate the academic value of these insights by publishing them for three different audiences: social scientists, research policymakers, and biological scientists.