Editor-in-Chief at Nature talks about open science

Philip Campbell participates in conference at FAPESP to speak about access to scientific information and research data today and in the future.

By Frances Jones

Agência FAPESP – When it comes to open science, defending free access to scientific articles and research data is easy. However, in practice, free access is complicated. In general terms, this was the position of the three speakers who participated in the conference “Science as an Open Enterprise: Open Data for Open Science,” held at FAPESP’s headquarters in São Paulo.

The conference brought together the Editor-in-Chief of Nature magazine, Philip Campbell; chemist Martyn Poliakoff (Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society); and the FAPESP’s Scientific Director, Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz.

“It is easy to talk about open science,” affirmed Campbell, the seventh editor in the history of the influential British science magazine, which was established in 1869. “But we must think about costs, the growth in the number of data and publications, the maintenance of these data and how to improve confidence in science.”Campbell is a member of the work group that prepared “Science as an Open Enterprise: Open Data for Open Science,” a 105-page report from the Royal Society. The document released in June 2012 analyzes the challenges and opportunities offered by the new forms of gathering, storing, manipulating and transmitting data and information from scientific research.

The report discusses how scientists need to adapt to changes in technological, social and political scenarios and presents recommendations from researchers, universities and research institutes, funding agencies, scientific magazines, associations and professional organizations.

For Campbell, who has a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Bristol and a master’s degree in astrophysics, making data available on the Internet is not enough. The data must be accessible, intelligible and reutilizable. And that has a cost.

He cited, among others, the example of the Worldwide Protein Databank, a global repository with information on the three-dimensional structures of large biological molecules, including proteins and nucleic acids, a project that has a total annual cost of US$12 million and employs 69 people.

Not even Nature offers open access to all of its content. To read its articles, one must be a subscriber. Campbell acknowledged that the number of subscribers has declined from its peak of 72,000 to roughly 50,000, and indicated that there will probably come a time when the print version no longer exists.

The magazine adopts the so-called “green” access standard, in which, after a certain time following publication, an author may publish the final version of his or her  article  in any other outlet, including a personal blog. Typically, according to Campbell, science journals require a 12-month wait. Nature requires only six months.

The magazine’s publisher, Nature Publishing Group, also offers “gold access”, in which the final version of an article is available to anyone as soon as it is published, and there are no subscription barriers—it can be used by any person for any purpose.

Campbell described another option, the “hybrid model,” in which a magazine has both articles that require a subscription and articles for which the author has paid to provide open access. Nature Communications uses such a model. According to Campbell,  authors paid an average of US$5,000 for this option for articles published by Nature Publishing Group  in 2012.

The editor indicates that the trend for Nature Publishing Group journals is to adopt hybrid models. “The editors want this but are limited by financial feasibility,” he said.  FAPESP President Celso Lafer and Chief Executive Officer José Arana Varela attended the conference, held on February 28. Varela and Poliakoff were the event’s moderators.

Funded research articles

Brito Cruz commented that several initiatives in Brazil have advanced open data in the world of science, mentioning Brazilian databases that are already available for free on the Internet. “Open access is not something completely new for us here,” he noted.

FAPESP’s scientific director cited open access information provided by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the Brazilian Statistics Institute (IBGE), the Lattes curriculum, the Virtual Library and the SciELO program (FAPESP/Bireme), “one of the largest repositories of scientific publications in the world.”

“There are not many countries with these types of completely open access data available to anyone in any part of the world. In Brazil, we think it is the norm, but it is not,” he said.

Brito Cruz also spoke about the policy of open access that has already been approved by FAPESP’s Board of Trustees, which established a repository for all research articles that receive support from FAPESP.

“The results of these grants and fellowships funded by FAPESP will have to be there, following the norms of each scientific magazine where the article was originally published. If the article is published in Nature, for example, it will have to wait six months,” he said. According to him, the repository will be ready in the second half of 2013.

Chemistry videos

Martyn Poliakoff, of the Royal Society, underscored that open investigation is particularly important in science and that the “explosion of data” that has come with technology must be organized and classified. Additionally, the public will be increasingly concerned with topics such as climate change and wants more data to know whether science is being conducted adequately.

“The data that we collect today can be used in the future in ways that we cannot even imagine,” Poliakoff explained. “The explorers of old that collected specimens of plants and animals knew nothing about DNA, and today their samples are being submitted to this type of investigation. When you collect data, you gather information that in the future can be analyzed in many different manners. These are things that will have an enormous value for scientists that haven’t even been born.”

Poliakoff, professor at the University of Nottingham, is known for a website (www.periodicvideos.com) where he presents videos of experiments with 118 elements of the periodic table. Several of these videos have Portuguese subtitles.

In 2010, FAPESP and the Royal Society promoted the UK–Brazil Frontiers of Science Symposium in Itatiba (SP). The event is part of the Frontiers of Science program, a series of meetings held periodically by the Royal Society in several countries with the objective of stimulating the participants to reflect on new fields of activity as well as other areas of knowledge. 

In September 2013, FAPESP and the Royal Society will work together to present a new event, to be held in London, that will bring together researchers from institutions in Brazil, the United Kingdom and other European countries.

Inside Nature

The conference participants completely filled FAPESP’s auditorium. Tel Amiel, researcher at the Center for Applied Information Technology for Education (Nied) at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), enjoyed hearing about Nature’s position with regard to the topic of “open science.”

“I think that the majority of the public here, and of people minimally involved with science, see Nature as a touchstone, a target. Even if it does not publish articles in every area, it has a vanguard outlook and is very realistic. I think the British perspective is pragmatic, with a very clear notion of what is and is not possible,” he said.

For Amiel, Brazil is a leader in this regard. “This was not one of those conversations where we came to hear from other countries what is happening. We came to understand what they are doing and to say what we are doing and discover the ways to make this work in a feasible manner, which maintains the quality and opens new paths for scientific production,” he said. 

According to Campbell, Nature receives 11,000 submissions of scientific articles annually. Sixty-five percent are discarded within a week because of scientific issues. The remaining articles are evaluated by two or three reviewers. At the end of the process, only 8% of the initial volume of articles are approved and published in the magazine.

For the editor-in-chief, Nature’s reviewers add value to the authors’ initial text  in several ways. The reviewers make recommendations to the authors to help them improve the article. Another is the editing, which helps to ensure  technical accuracy and improves writing.

Campbell noted that a section has been added to Nature articles to indicate the role each author played in the research and the preparation of the paper. “There is an average of six authors per article. One measure taken by the magazine some years ago was to formally request that the authors specify the contribution of each author of the work.”

In Campbell’s opinion, the area that most benefits from open access is  climate-change studies. “There are many different groups interested in climate change, be they researchers, government agencies, private companies or citizens; all want to discover things about any and every aspect of climate,” he said to Agência FAPESP.

Campbell went to explain, “The literature is published in many different scientific magazines, and if they are closed, it is impossible for any researcher to find them with ease. Since we need people from all disciplines and from several places working on climate change, it seems reasonable to make data open.”

He pointed out that there are parallels in the health area, although the knowledge is specialized and there are risks associated with the general public’s erroneous interpretation of health data. “But I think that we can assume that it is better to have too much knowledge than too little,” he said.