- The document discusses the history and perspectives around open access to academic publications and research data. It explores the tensions between making information openly available versus concerns about commercial exploitation and government overreach. - While open data aims to extend the benefits of science, questions remain around what type of data should be openly shared, who would curate and host it, and how businesses could or should interact with openly available data and information. Academics are also motivated by perceptions of prestige and reputation in addition to wider impacts. - Effectively implementing open data policies requires addressing practical challenges like data formatting and long-term hosting, as well as ensuring proper incentives and benefits for academics who generate and provide access to research outputs and findings.

1. Open Data: Touching Upon
the Intangible
Prof. Tom Welton
Department of Chemistry
Imperial College

2. Open Access Pre-Finch/RCUK
• A social movement spearheaded by academics.
• Science is for all and not just those who can
afford to pay for it.
• To open science to the public, who did after all
pay for most of it.
• To wrest scientific publishing from money-
grabbing commercial publishers.

3. Open Access Post-Finch/RCUK
• Overbearing government control opposed by
academics.
• An attack on academic freedom.
• A disaster in the making that will take money
away from research and prevent the free
publication of results.
• A gift to money-grabbing commercial publishers.
• Patchy uptake.

4. How did we get here?
• Academics are as mad as a bag of cats.
• Steam ahead and they’ll get used to it and move
on to the next catastrophe/attack on their
academic freedom.

5. View from the HoD’s office
• Policies and procedures are helpful to determine
how things can happen.
• They are not why things happen.
• The most effective way to ensure that something
will not happen is for the HoD to give an
instruction that it should.
• The best way to get an academic to do anything
is for it to be their idea.

6. Intangible Value
• Is there something that we are not considering?
• Which is more valuable?

7. Reasons to Publish
What the publishers say
• The RSC:
– To be foremost in the world at promoting and
developing the chemical sciences for the benefit of
society.
• The ACS:
– Improving people’s lives through the transforming
power of chemistry.
• Wiley:
– aspires to be a valued and respected provider of
products and services that make important
contributions to advances in knowledge and
understanding...

8. Reasons to Publish
What academics say
• To extend the benefits of science to the wider
world.
• To have the greatest impact for my research.
• To advance the subject.
• Communicate my results to peers.
• Advance my career.
• Attract further funding.

9. Reasons to Publish
The Terrible Truth

10. Reasons to Publish
The Terrible Truth
• Perceived Status!

11. Reasons to Publish
The Terrible Truth
• Perceived Status!
• Prestige

12. Reasons to Publish
The Terrible Truth
• Perceived Status!
• Prestige
• Reputation
–“Of course we don’t take league tables
seriously, but we are number ten in
the…”

13. Reasons to Publish
The Terrible Truth
• Perceived Status!
• Prestige
• Reputation
– “Of course we don’t take league tables
seriously, but we are number ten in the…”
• These intangible benefits are just as
important as tangible benefits.

14. What are we trying to achieve?
• To use open data to extend the benefits of
science to the wider world.
• To do the best science possible.
• To provide data in useable form
• To provide data in a sustainable way.
• To provide tools that allow data to be used
imaginatively.
• This needs more than regulatory compliance.

15. What do we need to decide?
• Do we really mean all data?
– Oops! I dropped the flask.
– Who answers this?
– Who is trusted to do the curation?
– Is the answer different for different subjects?
• Does ‘freely available’ mean the same as ‘free to
make money from’?
• Who holds the data?
– University repositories, professional bodies,
publishers?

16. How will it happen?
• Somebody needs to do the practical stuff.
– Businesses must be allowed to succeed.
– Is it O.K. to have businesses that sell our own data
back to us?
– Data must be protected from being lost behind a
single commercial product.
• Academics need to supply the data in the best
possible form.
– This requires that prestige be delivered for doing so.