Accessing the reservoir of scientific knowledge

Seeing research as a reservoir that can be accessed when needs and challenges call for it, is a valuable and often-used metaphor for its societal impact. Publicly funded science is mainly justified by expectations of a return of investment and benefits for society. When evaluated, returns and benefits are mostly found to be significant, but that they also frequently occur after many years. This is especially the case for basic research where the link between discoveries and innovation and other forms of use may be indirect and delayed. However, when science is expected to solve an imminent problem, like during the pandemic, established reservoirs of knowledge and emerging results were both important. But how can access to this knowledge be ensured?

The reservoir relevant for Covid-19

With the fast rate at which Covid-19 spread across the globe, many funding bodies called for proposals to battle this threat, usually with demands of making research outputs freely available. The idea was simple: since time was of the essence, there was a need to accelerate research so that other researchers speedily could build on recent discoveries and reap the benefits of science to the full extent of its potential.

However, battling the pandemic also demanded access to the reservoir of existing knowledge. It is an example of how open science practices were perceived as necessary to achieve goals and to achieve them faster. Thus, the pandemic is a good starting point for discussing the role of science as a reservoir.

Access to publications in the reservoir

The pandemic did not start in a knowledge vacuum – researchers needed access to all relevant knowledge that preceded the pandemic. COVID-19 is a disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is related to the SARS-CoV-1 virus that caused the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, and related to the MERS-CoV which was the cause of the outbreak starting in 2012. There was consequently much research to build upon.

Previously published research on these related viruses was often hidden behind paywalls, and accessible only for institutions paying for subscriptions to relevant journals. A call for ‘all peer-reviewed research publications relevant to the outbreak [to be] made freely available at least for the duration of the outbreak’ was issued on January 31^st, 2020, the day after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new coronavirus outbreak a ‘public-health emergency of international concern’. The call was answered by academic publishers and most of the academic literature harboring relevant knowledge, was temporarily made freely available.

While this undertaking acknowledged the importance of access to the reservoir of knowledge, it also raised the obvious question of why the academic literature was not openly available in the first place. If time is essential and scientific progress needs to operate at maximum speed, it is puzzling that decisions to accelerate science are in the hands of key commercial actors. The situation is no less puzzling when it seemingly is up to academic publishers to define when the outbreak is over. One example: while most relevant research still was openly available, at least one publisher, BMJ, closed parts of their portfolio.

Can access be accelerated?

One approach for accelerating science and its use was increase in preprint-publishing. This is the practice of open dissemination of research before it has been quality-checked through peer review. To become part of the scientific reservoir, research is usually validated by peer review, which is administrated by journals, but these procedures usually take a long time (with large variations between fields).

The decision to attempt to accelerate science through pre-print-publishing was not primarily made by journals and publishers, but by scientists and scientific communities. We observe a sharp rise in the use of preprints: researchers shared more than 35 percent of the early COVID-19 literature as preprints.

This practice spawned still on-going debates over the quality of research and the role of preprints in the reservoir of knowledge. Some saw only benefits of rapid sharing of research results, while others perceived an intrusion of un-validated research in the stock of knowledge. It has been claimed that preprints have changed science profoundly, but with a cost related to the integrity of science and the trustworthiness of its results.

Access to data

Another part of the reservoir is data. It can be argued that transparency in data brings validity to research by letting the scientific community inspect the results and conclusions in academic papers. Publishing data sets is not often done, maybe because this provides limited return on investment in the CVs of ambitious scientists.

Even with the increase in funder mandates for sharing of datasets, worries have been raised about significant challenges with the quality of data. One may argue that data sharing helps the scientific community to address such issues, but also that there is a risk for investigations to build upon poorly validated data sets.

Still, if data quality issues can be addressed, empirical data collected in research projects can remain useful for future projects. This may provide a springboard unto which new projects can be built, without the need of going back and forth to collect the same data. As the outbreak of pandemics tend to occur at different time intervals, there is also general-purpose data needed for planning purposes. The data need not be content specific but can be picked up for use when the need arises. With the urgency that pandemics demand, collecting the data when it is needed may prove costly and time consuming. Restrictions due to the pandemic can also make it difficult to collect data in real time.

To summarize, the metaphor of science as a reservoir expresses the importance of being able to access earlier publications and data when needs arise. It also highlights how the advancement of science depends – or ideally depends – on previous science. During the pandemic, access to the reservoir of knowledge came into the spotlight, but this less seen for other major challenges like climate change, health issues, and fighting poverty.

Funders and governments worldwide have introduced demands to open science practices based on ideas that this will increase or accelerate innovation, learning, and other impacts, arguing that sharing data and publishing open access should be the new normal. The pandemic may have provided strong arguments in favor for more open practices in science, but it also revealed that there is still a long way to go to handle challenges tied to integrity and trustworthiness.

This text is part of a series of blogs from the OSIRIS centre. We will publish a number of these blogs in the coming weeks leading up to the final conference that we organise together with R-QUEST (our sister centre focused on research quality) on November 8^th. To sign up for this conference, which will be held in Oslo but also streamed to a wider audience, click here.