Science for everyone: What opportunities and risks does “Open Science” entail?

"The Rhine-Main universities want to provide as unlimited access to their research results as possible. This has many advantages, but also entails some risks. An Open Science Festival will take place in Mainz on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The corona pandemic has shown how helpful it is when researchers quickly share their findings with the world. 

However, universities have long been pursuing the goal of reaching the largest possible audience with science: the keyword Open Science summarizes all efforts not only to share research results quickly and widely, but also original data and the means by which they are obtained - for example software and devices.

 

The universities of Frankfurt, Darmstadt and Mainz have committed themselves to promoting all aspects of open science. In an as yet unpublished paper, which the FAZ has seen, they express their willingness to grant free access to data, research results, teaching materials and parts of their infrastructure where it is possible and sensible. This makes research results easier to verify and use and increases the visibility of science.

 

“Don’t reveal original ideas too early”

 

On Tuesday and Wednesday, an open science festival will also take place at the University of Mainz, where ideas and initiatives for transparent science will be presented. Stefan Müller-Stach will give the welcoming speech. The Vice President for Research at Gutenberg University is convinced that open access - publishing outside of specialist journals - advances research: "Good science can only work if you publish as early as possible."

 

The mathematician believes it is equally important to share what often makes the advancement of knowledge possible in the first place: "By giving young researchers open access to equipment and methods, we are also doing something to prevent established scientists from cultivating their own assets, so to speak."

 

Müller-Stach knows that more transparency also brings with it dangers. One risk with open access is that exciting results from a doctoral thesis, for example, could be stolen by fraudsters and then published in a lower-quality journal. "Researchers need to be made aware of the fact that they should not reveal original ideas too early."

 

Post from amateur mathematicians

 

There have also been cases in which preprint servers, on which work is published before it has been reviewed by peers, have been used for entirely unscientific purposes. Last year, a former employee of the University of Frankfurt posted a paper with an absurd success story on such a platform - apparently with the intention of discrediting his former working group.

 

Open access media often have an editorial board that can intervene in the event of obvious misuse. Müller-Stach admits, however, that nonsense can sometimes be published on the university's own platform "Gutenberg Open Science" without it being immediately noticed. However, he has not yet heard of anything like that.

 

 

The vice president sees another side effect of the new openness as fundamentally positive: "Open access means that more suspected cases of scientific misconduct may be reported." This would be an improvement in quality if it were not slander.

 

It is inevitable that self-proclaimed private scholars draw their own conclusions from freely available data and essays and in turn delight professional researchers with their findings without being asked. Müller-Stach himself receives mail from amateur mathematicians who believe they have finally proven the famous Riemann conjecture on the random distribution of prime numbers. He bears it with composure."

 

If our goal is faster economic development, based on investments in research by the state and private companies, then more people pushing our research forward automatically means more chances to create applications in practice, about which the most important scientists often know little.