A call for a commitment to open science
Academic research does not give us the answers we need.
Over the last few months, we at CSEI, have talked to civil society and philanthropic organisations in our quest to improve rural water security programmes.
The same scientific questions (vs. moral dilemmas) surface in every conversation; the questions are scientific in the sense that they can be addressed by engaging in empirical data analyses. E.g. How do we know if our intervention is benefitting farmers (vs exogenous factors like markets and rainfall)? Are all farmers benefitting equally? Are downstream farmers worse off? Which aquifers are being recharged? What are the reasonable boundaries of the aquifer system for participatory groundwater management can be initiated? Which trees should we plant so that we contribute to infiltration and soil conservation without drying up streams? How do soil and water conservation measures improve crop yields?
There are few consistent answers, especially in the water sector. Where answers exist, researchers have usually drawn conclusions from models, which were parameterised from Western long-term field observatories. We need increased attention to field-based research, not just to tweak model parameters for Indian conditions, but actually discover new mechanisms and processes or even evaluate alternative model structures. But with a few exceptions of new critical zone observatories, we seem to be going in the opposite direction.
A lot of knowledge being produced in universities has no viable pathway to societal change.
To address this gap, we need a commitment to “Open Science”
We urgently need better data and evidence to solve societal problems. But this isn’t happening fast enough. A lot of knowledge being produced in universities has no viable pathway to societal change. And when colleagues produce local data painstakingly collected over years of fieldwork, they find it hard to get published. Their research is dismissed as a “local case study”, lacking novelty. Western editors of journals refuse to send such work out for review.
On the flip side, even well-meaning researchers from the global north can be blind. Often, from their perspective, an “Indian farmer” is a distant abstract entity.
On the flip side, even well-meaning researchers from the global north can be blind. Often, from their perspective, an “Indian farmer” is a distant abstract entity. For instance, in one recent conversation, a well-respected and otherwise lovely American collaborator asked me if I could set up interviews with farmers to test some hypotheses. I asked him, what I might present to the farmer as an incentive — meaning how might farmers in general (if not that specific farmer) benefit from the research — considering I would be asking him to lose a day’s wage. Because we knew the farmers in the region personally, their well-being was not an abstract concept for us. But it was clear that the farmers might have agency or motivations of their own had never crossed my collaborator’s mind.
Much has been written about the need to decolonise science. As a result of current structures, developing country researchers have few choices — to be the nth author in syntheses or meta-analyses papers by Western colleagues, or build large scale, regional models, using remotely sensed data to demonstrate scale. Others devise increasingly esoteric (to the point of absurdity) theoretical frameworks in a bid to demonstrate novelty.
None of these choices gets us any closer to either solving the problem or promoting the application of science. On the contrary, it fosters a sense that science is only done within an abstruse club of elites, not to be engaged with or trusted. Grassroots organisations (correctly) dismiss science as not being useful and focus on pleasing donors by presenting “cute pictures of women farmers with goats” as evidence of impact. Meanwhile, groundwater levels keep dropping and farmers trapped in cycles of debt, kill themselves.
How will this change? The scientific community must accept that we are part of the problem. We are only going to be able to solve societal problems if we see knowledge production as the quest to make research relevant and accessible. This requires co-creating knowledge with partners from across academia, industry, public authorities as well as citizen groups.
The European Commission has shown leadership by taking the first steps in this direction. They argue that an open science philosophy improves the quality, efficiency, and responsiveness of research and when all relevant actors are invited to participate in the whole research and innovation process, creativity and trust in science increases.
We need a change in the culture and mindset of scientists.
Grand political statements are a good start, but not enough. For change to occur, we need the scientific community at large to change how research is tracked, measured, and valued. This includes journal editors, university promotion committees, and award committees. We have to challenge the constant demand for “novelty” and create space for well-written, high-quality, defensible technical papers that can actually be used. In the past, when people still communicated through books, such work might have ended up in a book chapter. But we have limited room for hard copy books and most content is now online. So what is the modern-day equivalent?
How do we make space for technical studies that are not necessarily novel; yet worthy of peer review? Perhaps we pay into a fund that guarantees high-quality peer review of technical studies? Maybe we need new journals or have existing journals dedicate a section for “technical papers” that have to be rigorous and yield local insight, but not novel in terms of methodology? Or create more avenues for “data papers”?
Open science also needs new types of recognition and award structures.
It is heartbreaking that carefully done grounded research that could actually help people has only a marginal place in our world, but our research institutions are also to blame. When I have asked scientists why their excellent field research study never saw the light of day, they typically respond by saying “I tried five journals they all refused to send it out for review, dismissing it as a case study. My university does not give me credit for anything other than peer-reviewed publications”.
So there is also a need to clarify how popular science writing and research reports not published in high-impact journals will be weighed in promotion decisions. The two most promising frameworks on how science might be evaluated to respond to the wicked problems we face are:
- IDRC’s Research Quality Framework, which aims to change how research is defined, monitored, and assessed.
- Utrecht University “open science” commitment that has defined new faculty performance criteria
Both these frameworks emphasize relevance, co-creation, and positioning for use. The key takeaway is that we have to move away from paper counting (which is quick and easy) towards a more thoughtful, nuanced approach that involves actually reading and reflecting on our colleagues' work.
Open science also needs new types of organisational structures.
Publishing is only the first step. After that, the research still needs to be positioned for use by decision-makers and/or communities of practice. For this researchers must “translate their research” into messages and formats that can be consumed by wider audiences. In today’s world of slick “content”, it requires a whole team of people skilled in visual communication.
Much remains to be done if we want to create institutions that actually solve societal problems. If co-creation is to be an integral part of the research process, as the open science paradigm demands, researchers, communicators, project managers, software developers, and outreach professionals would have to work in the same team. For this, we need to figure out how academic and non-academics can work alongside in harmony and mutual respect.
Managing transdisciplinary teams, however, is a complex endeavor. One can theorise about transdisciplinary research and open science, but implementing the idea in practice requires working through the nitty-gritty of how to create career paths and engender collaboration between people with widely different skills, pay scales, temperaments, and life goals.
This is a non-trivial problem; but there are emerging examples of how it might be done in transdisciplinary institutions like the Stockholm Resilience Centre, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, and the Institute for Development Studies, Sussex.
I am very interested in this problem. If you have suggestions, best practices or ideas on making open science a reality, please do contact me at veena.srinivasan@atree.org.
This was delivered as the keynote lecture at the 48th IAH conference in Brussels on 10 September 2021.
