If science is to help solve the world’s most important problems in improving human health, protecting the environment, and ensuring national security, scientific research must be transparent and collaborative.
In the United States, the openness that scientists observe in their work reflects the openness of American society. It is the work environment that adheres to transparency that attracts talent from around the world.
In addition, the talent of scientists from diverse backgrounds working in the U.S. promotes constructive collaboration.
“It’s great when scientists want to come from abroad and work with Americans because they think we have an extremely positive scientific culture,” said Richard Freeman, a Harvard University economist who has studied the relationship between different kinds of collaborations and academic citations. – People from so many different backgrounds from so many countries work here – I think that strengthens American science.
In some countries, research is strictly controlled. “There are all sorts of ethics and oversight issues when everything is done in a closed system, without proper monitoring and without input from the entire scientific community,” said Alex Joske, a researcher at the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy’s International Cyber Policy Center. Moreover, “if the direction of research is too tightly controlled, it doesn’t allow for creativity and new ideas.”
According to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s 2018 data, the U.S. international collaboration rate was 37 percent, up 12 percent from 2006.
Freeman’s research at Harvard showed that the more diverse the research collaboration, the greater the impact of experimentation. In a paper published in 2014, Freeman and his colleague Wei Huang concluded that when co-investigators had different ethnic backgrounds, their publications were more likely to be cited.
“The quality of the research articles may not have been higher,” Freeman said. – But they had more readers, and more readers for a scientific article is a good thing in itself.” The extra attention means that other scientists are likely to try to recreate the experiment or extend its results.
Government sponsors scientific research
According to the same 2018 data provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the federal government remains the largest funder of basic research; it accounts for 44 percent of the total.
“One of the things about the publicly funded research model that we have in this country is that it really allows these more esoteric and foundational questions to be studied,” said Michael Weisberg, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where his research focuses on the philosophy of science. – If this were a private scientific enterprise, we would never be able to do the kind of research we do.”
Weisberg said that because basic science is largely funded by taxpayers, government funding agencies such as the U.S. National Science Foundation require that researchers applying for federal grants demonstrate in their proposals that their work has “broader impact,” or the research project has the potential to benefit society. This encourages scientists to develop scientific knowledge as responsible citizens.
“Open science is the transparent and inclusive work of the scientific process,” explained Brian Nosek, head of the Center for Open Science, which provides online tools for scientific research. – “If you don’t see how I got to the discoveries I made, you can’t replicate them and you can’t challenge them.
Many initiatives involve global scientific collaboration. Open Source Malaria, for example, seeks to develop new drugs for malaria. Hundreds of participants from around the world use the online platform it developed to share ideas and data. In 2016, this consortium published a paper on potential antimalarial compounds that had more than 50 authors from seven countries.
“It’s really encouraging to have work done openly because you’re collaborating with people you’ve never met and with people who have amazing expertise,” says Matthew Todd, chair of the Department of New Drug Research at University College London and founder of Open Source Malaria.
Reviewing and publishing papers
When scientists make discoveries, they submit manuscripts for publication in scientific journals, and these articles go through a peer review process in which the work is evaluated by other scientists doing research in similar fields. Manuscripts that go through the peer-review process are then published in the scientific journal to which the scientist submitted the work.
In the U.S., scholarly journals are increasingly making content available for free. (The publishing fee is often paid by the author, the laboratory, or the sponsoring institution.) For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science, launched Science Advances in 2015 with fully open access.
Gemma Hersh, vice president of global policy at Elsevier, which publishes more than 2,500 scientific journals, notes that all Elsevier journals now have an open access option, and 10 percent of them are fully open access.
Working with the public
Scientists in the U.S. are committed to bringing their research to the public.
“We’re seeing an increasing emphasis on that,” said Weisberg of the University of Pennsylvania. He cites public science initiatives and volunteering with high school teachers to help them teach kids better.
The University of Pennsylvania, for example, has an office to help researchers find specific ways to do outreach.
“The more interested people understand how science works, not even so much the scientific facts, but what the scientific process looks like and what scientific methods look like, the more responsive they are to thinking critically about science,” Weisberg said.