Opening science: towards an agenda of open science in academia and industry

Research dissemination: from closed journals to open access publications. Many research institutions are opening up their research on open access platforms in order to accelerate knowledge diffusion and with that also knowledge creation. At the world’s largest high energy physics lab CERN 3,000 scientists from 174 institutes from 38 countries experiment on a budget of CHF 1 billion with the 27 km long accelerator (LHC, status 2011). Results are published on the open access platform Atlas Twiki Portal where the estimated 15,000 high energy physics scientists around the globe can read them instantly. In doing so, the high-energy physics community paves the way for new forms of scientific exchange and communication that enable fast peer reviewed publication. The community of high-energy physics is predestined for open access since the community is rather close. In the field of management and economics the opening up of the publication process is slower. Alexandria of the University of St. Gallen has been an early participant in open access, showing a slow start but a rapid acceleration in access statistics in recent years. In contrast to slow and rigid publication procedures of many peer reviewed journals, the Internet-based open platforms offer the possibility to timely make research results available and claim leadership of thought. According to the CERN experience in high-energy physics, the open access initiative accelerated knowledge diffusion by more than a year. When in 2008 the blueprint of the LHC accelerator was published online, thousands of downloads were registered within days. An analysis of citation data showed that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints created an immense citation advantage (Gentil-Beccot and Mele 2009). In many publicly funded research projects the results have to be distributed feely. At the Swiss CTI the establishment of a knowledge distribution platform in form of published results is very helpful in order to receive grants. In most EU funded projects the open distribution of knowledge is already a prerequisite to get funding.

Role of research institutes: from ivory towers to knowledge brokers. Traditionally, there was a gap between research driven universities and application driven private companies. This gap is diminishing, as the distribution of tasks between academia and industry changes. The tremendous rise of technology transfer fostered by many universities and private companies further closes the gap between science and practice. For instance, the ETH Zurich and IBM jointly operate the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center in Zurich. The center provides a common collaboration platform for researchers of both institutions. As equal collaboration partners, both institutions have the right to publish and to commercialize the jointly created IP. This dual relationship increases the pressure on both partners to timely find applications for the scientific findings generated and to commercialize research results. The local consolidation of many highly dedicated innovation teams proofed to accelerate knowledge creation and opens up fast ways for the commercialization of current results. Additionally, mutual career paths in the ETH and IBM emerged that manifest a liaison management between both entities and create spill-over effects especially with respect to the transfer of tacit knowledge. In recent years, the self-conception of many universities and research institutes changed. Many public institutes moved from being a provider of basic research, towards more application centric research. To enable multiplication on a global scale and to merge competences, various research institutes formed networks that aim at providing direct solutions for business problems. The Auto-ID Labs are a prominent example. They represent a leading global network of academic research laboratories in the field of networked RFID. The labs consist of seven renowned research institutes—including the MIT Lab, the ETH Zurich Lab, the Cambridge Lab, the Fudan Lab, and the Keio Lab—located on four different continents. The goal of the Auto-ID Labs is to architect the ‘Internet of things’ and to provide an efficient infrastructure, which facilitates new business models and applications on the basis of the RFID technology.

Outsourcing research: from make to buy. The industrial trend of reducing the value chain activities to focus on core competencies has also affected the relationship between private, application oriented businesses and research institutes. Following this trend, many companies cut their expenses in corporate basic research. As a consequence, numerous firms started to outsource research activities: The elevator company Schindler works together with the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cologne. On the basis of precise requirements, Schindler outsourced the development of genetic algorithms for its latest elevator control systems. In this regard, the Institute of Applied Mathematics became a knowledge and technology supplier at the very front end of Schindler’s innovation process. Daimler outsourced many of the telematics research to several research institutes and universities. ABB outsourced its research on inspection robotics for their installations to a joint venture with the ETH Zurich. SAP has set up several decentralized research labs on campuses of universities, e.g., TU Darmstadt, ETH Zurich, and St.Gallen. Novartis is more and more relying on start-up firms and research institutions to fill the technology pipeline in research and preclinical development. Additionally, the outsourcing of research activities offers SMEs new possibilities to overcome the ‘liabilities of smallness’ (Gassmann and Keupp 2007). Earlier, due to resource constrains, many SMEs were not able to conduct basic research on their own. Thus, outsourcing scientific problems to research institutions allows them to increase their competitive position.

Financing of research: from single-source to multiple-source funding. In recent years, the increasing cost pressure on many public households, led to declining budgets in many public research institutions. Formerly being largely financed by public money, many universities are forced to find additional ways for financing research activities and thus progressively seek third party financing. Various universities increased their activities in technology transfer and in IP commercialization. For example, 25 Bavarian academic institutes formed a patent exploitation network, which is coordinated by a patent bureau. Under the roof of the Fraunhofer Institute, BayernPatent is responsible for the IP commercialization. Additionally, it assists inventors with the filing of patents. Thereby, it works closely with local patent attorneys and offices. BayernPatent covers 100 % of the patent filing and maintenance costs and thus minimizes the risk for the academic institutes. Revenues are split equally between the inventor (25 %), the faculty (25 %), the university (25 %), and BayernPatent (25 %). Whereas many universities moved from public to more private funding, numerous corporations made an opposite shift. In the 80’s roughly 80 % of Siemens’ Corporate Technology was financed by uncommitted corporate funds. Today, more than 70 % have to be financed by Corporate Technology on its own responsibility via third party money or business units. This trend is also reflected by several other large firms such as ABB, Daimler, and Philips, which are forced to collaborate with universities and spend seed money in basic research. This supports the universities in their research.

Research culture: from closed disciplinary to open interdisciplinary thinking. For decades, science was predominantly driven by disciplinary research. Within the scientific community, research streams were influenced by few dedicated and topic specific journals. A narrow and disciplinary framing of research articles increased the probability of getting accepted. Additionally, the dogma of ‘publish or perish’ forced researchers to keep their work secret—at least in the early stage of competition—until submitting it to a scientific journal. This development led to scientific progress but also to disciplinary silos. Within the last decades, the number of interdisciplinary journals grew constantly and new forms of Internet-based collaborations emerged. Offering new ways of publication and collaboration, this development caused a change in thinking towards more open and interdisciplinary research. New scientific cross-links between various research fields offer novel platforms for publication. With this the entire scientific landscape is in constant flux, new research areas emerge and others vanish.

Focus of research: from broad universities to specific institutes. Within the scientific landscape the specialization of research institutes in the public but also private sector increased. The requirement to be more cost efficient forced research activities to be closer related to the core competencies—responsible for value creation and profit generation—of the executing institutes. Within the public sector, specialized researches institutes were formed that attract new researchers as well as private companies. Numerous examples can be found in the sector of environmental technologies in Germany. In the private sector, companies deliberately invest in basic research in strategic fields of major importance. For example, Sulzer Innotec became a specialist for computational fluid dynamics. Later, their know-how in simulation software was applied in the development of a wide variety of products.

Patents: from stockpiling to patent donation. During the last years, the number of global patent applications of private companies has dramatically increased. Accordingly, firms are confronted with ever growing filing and maintenance costs. Recently, a trend has started: private companies donate patents to research institutions. Many companies reserve the right to license the patent free of charge within their field of business. Doing so, research institutes may use the patent in other fields and leverage knowledge to new areas of application enabling cross-industry innovations. DuPont is a prominent case of a patent donor. The company donated patents amounting to a value of US$64 million to the Pennsylvania State University and Virginia Tech. The Kellogg Company gave away patents worth US$49 million to the Michigan State University. Both firms could realize important tax benefits, cost cuttings, and have benefited from positive public relations (Ziegler et al. 2014).

Higher acceptance of open access. According to a study 89 % of all scientists favor open access journals, but only 8 % actually publish in them (Dallmeier-Tiessen et al. 2010). Despite that “open access journals unchain content and speed up science”—stated Mele (director at CERN)—the acceptances of these journals are not equally high in every scientific field. While in medicine and high energy physics open access journals have very high impact factors, their acceptance in the field management research is rather low. However, in all fields we can observe an increasing acceptance and use of open access journals for publishing. How can a higher acceptance of open science be achieved? Respectively, it seems necessary to look at incentives and reward systems for users of open science platforms that go beyond reputational aspects (Scheliga and Friesike 2014).

Open reviewing and new measurements. As the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology put it (2002), peer review “is an inherently conservative process … [that] … encourages the emergence of self-serving cliques of reviewers, who are more likely to review each others’ grant proposals and publications favorably than those submitted by researchers from outside the group. New ways of complementary measuring scientific output are needed. There is a need to develop a system of scientific impact 2.0”. Despite this apparent critique, initiatives to open up the review process are suffering from acceptance. In June 2006, Nature launched an experiment in opening up the peer review process. A number of articles, which had been submitted to the regular review process, were also made available for an open online review. Only 5 % of the authors agreed to participate in the experiment, and half of those articles (46 %) did not even receive a single comment. More research is required to fully understand why researchers are reluctant to open review processes and which measures are necessary to improve its acceptance. Today’s measurement of scientific impact is mostly based on journal impact factors. This measurement is rather slow, closed, and biased by social group effects. A key factor to establish new measurements for scientific impact could be played by services that publish individual user measures (e.g., Research Gate or Google Scholar). Here different impact measurements are opened up to the public: e.g., average number of citations per paper and per author, Hirsch’s h-index and related parameters, Zhang’s e-index, Egghe’s g-index as well as age-weighted citation rate, or Research Gates own RG Score. The often seen isolation of peer-reviewed journals from practice and society could be overcome by the diffusion of research results in social media. Here, research can be addressed, commented, and better marketed. Publications could be selected and evaluated by interested readers. Social media already plays a prominent role in the altmetrics discussion, however more empirical evidence is needed (Priem et al. 2012; Piwowar 2013).

Virtual knowledge creation. With the use of the Internet, new forms of sharing and generating knowledge came to light that led to new challenges: how can collectivly generated knowledge be published? What are guiding frames concerning plagiarism? How should plagiarism be handled? In the Anglo-Saxon dominated science landscape, each researcher is evaluated based on his or her individual scientific contribution. This requires that a clear assignment of contribution is possible. The collaborative knowledge creation in virtual networks—often described as E-Science—challenges this dogma as a precise identification of individual researchers and their work is often not possible. New solutions are required regarding the assignment problem in case several authors work on one contribution.

Quality assurance of scientific content. The successful opening of science presupposes explicit measures for quality assurance with respect to content. Considering the rise of open science platforms, decisions about user authorizations and access rights have to be made. In many cases regular citizens help to investigate scientific problems (Franzoni and Sauermann 2014). These researchers have no scientific background, which imposes new challenges for research management. How do new forms of evaluation and review systems that secure rigorousness of research look like? Transparency seems to be key. The comprehensibility of the entire research process—from the very first idea to the final results—is crucial for the quality assurance of crowd science projects. An open question remains regarding the choice of a platform: which one is the right one for which project?

Accelerating interdisciplinary science. Based on open science platforms, unrestricted navigation across different subject areas and scientific disciplines is possible. It leads to new ways of reviewing existing knowledge. What is the impact of new search and language processing technologies on the creation of new interdisciplinary insights?

Outsourcing research by SMEs. Within an economy, SMEs present the largest number of companies. The effect of open science on research collaborations of SMEs leaves room for further investigations (van de Vrande et al. 2009): what are success factors? How are collaboration processes characterized? What are relevant intermediaries and platforms for the matchmaking between research and SMEs?

IP trade. As outlined before, the tradability of knowledge in form of IP is a catalyst for opening up science. Yet, the determinants of successful trade are not investigated sufficiently. Patent valuation remains a challenge, as most patent transactions are not publicly disclosed. Efficient market places for IP might lead to more open approaches in research, as they will give more guidance in patent valuation. Furthermore, possible negative consequences of an open trade of IP—e.g., effects of patent trolls on value creation—have to be investigated in more detail. How can IP be made more tradable?