Why make computational methods openly accessible?

We’ve put an emphasis on making bioinformatics methods on Truwl as open and accessible as possible. That means being able to see content without an account and building the platform to be friendly for search engines. GitHub is a good model for this. When was the last time you went to GitHub’s homepage? Before becoming curious about what was actually on GitHub’s landing page, the answer to that for me was ‘never’. To see content on GitHub, you don’t need an account and don’t have to enter through a front door to see what’s inside — you type your query into Google, and if it’s code you’re looking for, you’ll likely get some GitHub hits in the top results. We like that concept a lot and have designed Truwl to enable the same kind of access. Doing this does take some extra effort, so what’s the point?

As in science, we don’t need to start from scratch and can build on solid work done by others. I keep a collection of messaging from various organizations, including PLOS. They have been a leader of promoting open science and have put out some of my favorite messaging. They even have a page dedicated to it: Why Open Access. Here’s a subset of messaging from PLOS that captures the important points.

• You deserve recognition for all the research outputs you create.
• Open Science tools and practices create more opportunities for you, as a researcher, to amplify your research and advance your career.
• Open Science is trusted science.
• Openness extends reach.
• Openness enhances quality.
• Openness drives progress.
• Openness shapes community.
• When you share more you also get more feedback.
• When research is publicly available, something special happens. Readers who need that research discover it, read it, share it, and cite it. That helps the original author and the scientific community more broadly.
• You recognize that by choosing to publish Open, you are joining in a mission to accelerate discovery, increase trust in science, and create a more equitable system of knowledge that is open to all.
• Reproducibility is the cornerstone of scientific advancement.
• Open Science fosters an environment where more scientific minds can work together toward solutions.

Open science is about maximizing communication

Reading through these and recalling many of the conversations we’ve had internally, I think the benefits of open science can be summed up in a few key ideas. First of all, open science is all about maximizing communication — transferring knowledge or capabilities from one set of people to others. On this two-way street, there needs to be benefits for both groups: the authors or creators and the audience or consumer. Most messaging in the above examples is focused on the creators, and rightly so. Without content, you have no audience.

So what are the benefits of openness to creators? It mostly comes down to getting your work in front of the largest audience possible and therefore maximizing the potential impact it can have. Let’s face it, doing research and putting results in a digestible form for others to understand takes a lot of work. And although some might enjoy the whole process on its own, most scientists want their work to have greater meaning which means that it is shown to be useful to someone else. But if the right people can’t find your work or access it, opportunities for others to benefit from your work are lost. Measurement of impact is also the currency of researchers. It’s used to justify your work to funding agencies, promotion and tenure committees, and be seen as an important contributor by scientific peers. If you’re a scientist and you’re not sharing your work, or your peers don’t think your work is important, your career is not going to thrive.

How about benefits for the audience? For scientific literature, being able to read the full-text of articles is sadly not a given, especially since much of that research is publicly funded. If you are not part of an organization that has institutional licenses or don’t have the means to pay hefty prices for individual articles, you have to jump through hoops to get the content you need, if you can get it at all. As identified in the PLOS messaging, additional benefits come from the collective benefits of broader access. With more eyes on the research, there are more people bringing expertise to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of research, determine its quality, dependability, and worthiness to be built upon which is “the cornerstone of scientific advancement”.

Open science is more than open-access publications

Discoveries and results shared in publications are not the only important scientific output of research efforts that need to be shared. Data, laboratory protocols, computational methods, and samples are all important products of research activity that benefit from broad accessibility. At Truwl, we’re focused on making bioinformatics methods accessible to everyone for the same reasons that PLOS does for publications — to benefit the creators and maintainers of these methods and the scientific community at large. While computational workflows can be executed directly from Truwl and the details of the analyses including sensitive private data must remain private — Truwl leverages best-in-class security features from cloud providers — we see tremendous benefits in making the methods themselves as easy to find, understand, and compare as possible.