June 1, 2016

Our topic this month is Open Access Research, which sounds wonky but is really about a fundamental principle that impacts us all, which is “Information wants to be free”. Not free as in without cost, but freely shared and disseminated. We stand on the shoulders of giants, those whose work came before our own. It’s ironic that this culture built upon broad dissemination of knowledge, data, and results is also one that has generally accepted a closed model for publication.

But this model is in the process of changing. Open source also arose from academic research in computer science. This is the concept of making your software source code freely available, which is now largely accepted as greatly benefiting not only the research community, but society. Our entire computing infrastructure, from mobile operating systems to supercomputer clusters is largely built on a robust open source core, because that is how improvements are made and errors and security flaws in code get fixed.

Open Access is a similar concept applied to other products of research. In this day and age of very low or zero-cost publication online, charging high subscription and publishing fees feels antiquated. Plus, much published research is paid for by public funding (in the form of tax-supported federal grants). So, many researchers have hacked around this by offering pre-prints, either self-published or through sites like ArXiv.org. This initiates a faster and perhaps even more efficient form of feedback and peer review. This disruption has taken a bit longer than in other publishing industries, but in the end, I believe Open Access is inevitable.

Furthermore, I believe the real frontier is not only providing access to research publications, but making the findings and implications of that research truly accessible and generally understandable. Very few researchers take the step of conveying their work in language approachable by someone outside their specific field, much less the general public. We live in a complex world, but oftentimes it seems like we're not even trying to make things clearer for the broader community. Einstein said “if you can’t explain it simply, than you don’t understand it well enough.” That's really good advice, and something I wish more academics would take to heart.

Youngmoo Kim, Director