1. Introduction
In contrast to the paradigm of scientific research emerged after World
War II (ended in 1945) in which “the majority of publications are
behind a paywall, raw data are hidden, methods ill-described, software
unreleased and reviews anonymous”,[1] “open
science” has emerged in the first two decades of the
21st century as a better way to practice scientific
research.
Researchers following the principles of open science make all research
outputs and methods openly and freely accessible immediately after
completion of research along with interoperable and reusable research
data.[2] This, inter alia , enhances the
credibility of published research thanks to reproducible results and
reproducible methods.[3]
In closer detail, in open science a research article is first published
on the Internet as freely and openly accessible preprint form prior to
submission to an academic journal for publication following peer
review.[4] From overly long review (and
publication) times through publication behind an expensive “paywall”
requiring ever more expensive subscriptions, this liberates the
dissemination of new knowledge from all the main problems of
conventional publishing of research findings.[5,6]
Substantially enhancing the quality and impact of research, the practice
of open science offers clear benefits also to researchers and to society
including for example enhanced opportunities of international
collaboration between researchers and faster pace of
innovation.[7,8]
The adoption of open science widely differs amid countries, in both
economically developed and developing areas of the world. Italy is amid
the most scientifically developed countries in the world. In a list of
countries ranked by number of scientific publications in academic
journals indexed by a proprietary research database (Scopus) owned by a
large scientific publisher (Elsevier), with 154,304 citable documents
published in 2021 Italy ranks 6th after China, USA,
Great Britain, India and Germany, ahead of Japan and
Russia.[9]
Amid the top ten countries in the aforementioned rank, only articles
from British researchers received an higher average number of citations
(1.45) to documents published in 2021 when compared to those (1.38) from
Italy-based researchers.[9]
Getting to the performance of Italy-based researchers in the adoption of
open sciences, however, in 2017 the head of open science at the
University of Milan succinctly described its poor state noting how
publishing open access (OA) articles was not yet common, with
researchers generally not knowing the foundations and the tools of OA
publishing, including widespread confusion between institutional
repositories and academic social networks.[10]
The same scholar was reporting the lack of impactful government policies
aimed at promoting open science.[10] In the
subsequent five years, substantial progress has been recorded but not to
the extent one could expect from a country where nearly 155,000 research
articles are authored and published every year.
This study identifies four main lessons, selected on a subjective basis
following the analysis of the slow uptake of open science in Italy, that
might be useful to scholars and research policy makers engaged in
promoting the uptake of open science culture and practices in their own
countries.
2. The uptake of open science in Italy
Aiming at “developing transparent processes, enhancing research
activity, its verifiability, the integrity of research results and
proper scientific communication”,[11] by June
2022 Italy’s government published a National Plan for Open Science. The
plan focuses on five areas of intervention including open scientific
publications, open research data, and research
evaluation.[11]
Previous policy attempts to promote the adoption of open science
practices in Italy included the requirement to make openly accessible
the publicly funded research articles submitted to the next evaluation
exercise (with an embargo period of 18 or 24 months) by the National
Research Evaluation Agency,[12,13] and a law
dating back to 2013 mandating OA for research articles resulting from
publicly funded research. [14]
It is enough to review the outcomes of one of the first meetings on OA
organized by the Conference of Rectors of the Italian Universities
(CRUI) in 2016 to learn that out of nearly 100 universities existing in
Italy, only 49 had signed the so called “Road Map to Open Access” in
2014. Yet, two years later out of these 49 institutions, only 16 had
adopted an OA policy,[15] and this despite the
fact that, as underlined by Giglia at the same meeting, “OA is only
10% of open science”.[16]
In the same year (2016) an Italian Open Science Support Group was
established as a voluntary working group of professionals specializing
in the areas of research support, libraries, open science, law, and
computer science from, amid others, the Universities of Milan, Venice,
Turin, Bologna, Trento, Parma, Padua, and Trieste.
The group between 2016 and 2018 organized several meetings and
workshops.[17] One of its main achievements was
the development of a policy model on open access that was submitted to
the CRUI Library Commission Open Access Working Group group), and
eventually approved.[18]
Previously (in early 2013), “aware of the benefits of Open Access for
national research in terms of visibility, promotion and dissemination”
the presidents of CRUI and of Italian public research centers had signed
an agreement “to act coordinately in order to achieve the success of
Open Access in Italy”.[19]
Eventually, in 2015 an Italian Association for Open Science (AISA) was
established as a non-profit organization fostering to disseminate in
Italy a culture of open science including the need to raise awareness
among Italian and European legislators to foster open science in
research assessment and intellectual property
policies.[20]
To understand the state of open access perception amid Italy’s scholars
it is instructive to review an online dialogue between an Italy-based
researcher and the head of open science at the University of Milan.
“Open Access is a business model identified by publishers, generally
commercial companies, in response to computerization and the consequent
ease of obtaining scientific articles for free, without having to bear
the cost (without entering into secularism or not). Fewer subscriptions,
less turnover. More Open Access, more turnover. It is therefore not
surprising that the governments of some states support Open Access,
which is usually paid for at a high price by research funds. In fact,
some major publishers have tax offices in the Netherlands, Germany, the
UK and bill several billions a year. The maximization of their turnover
is therefore in the interest of their governments, which will be able to
collect more direct tax revenues both on companies and on the work of
employees, as well as on related activities, and from indirect taxation
on employee consumption.
Therefore, why the Ministry of University and Research should squander
resources to benefit the tax authorities of other states, instead of
using the limited resources of Italian taxpayers to benefit the
taxpayers of others?”.[21]
To whom Galimberti responded:
“None of the reasons you cited are reflected in the history of open
access that arises precisely as a reaction of scientists to the closure
and marketing of the contents they produce and freely sold to
publishers…When I noticed that in Italy there are few and totally
confused ideas, I was referring to interventions like this.”[22]
Regardless of the delays highlighted by
Galimberti,[10,22] one of the most relevant and
practically useful books on open science in Europe was published in
Italian in 2017 as freely and openly accessible
book.[23] One of the main needs identified therein
by Giglia is the need to develop both a new culture of open science and
new tools such as the preprint platforms and online repositories to
self-archive and make openly accessible research articles and other
scientific documents, including books.[24]
With EU funds made available, a European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) was
established in 2015 as an international non-profit organization under
Belgian law with national branches, that officially launched in late
2018 starting to provide access to their to services via the EOSC portal
at the URL www.eosc-hub.eu. In Italy a Competence Centre on Open Science
was thus created within the Italian Computing and Data Infrastructure, a
forum of major Italian research and internet infrastructures. The
Competence Centre organizes a number of activities including new
seminars such as the “Open Science Café” monthly interactive online
presentations focusing on a specific theme of open science.
The series debuted on March 2021 with a seminar on Open Research Europe
(the new publication platform of the European Commission for which a 5.8
million EUR, four-year contract was signed on March 2020 with a open
research publishing platform owned by a large scientific publisher) held
by an Italian scholar based at the University of
Göttingen.[25]
Similarly, by late 2021, a website focusing on open science was launched
at the URL www.open-science.it. Managed by professionals of the
aforementioned Competence Centre and experts of an Italy’s Research
Council (CNR) institute, the website includes information (in Italian)
on many aspects of open science and its ongoing uptake.
Finally, following similar “networks” already existing in other
countries including Australia, an Italian Reproducibility Network was
established in 2021 which also organizes seminars on open science
inaugurated in the same year by a seminar of Nosek on the culture change
required for a “more open, rigorous and reproducible
research”.[26]
Along with several other researchers,[27,28] one
of us has suggested that enhancing the uptake of open science requires
to undertake new and practically oriented educational activities aimed
at young and senior researchers.[4] Similarly, in
2017 a European Commission publication of the Working Group on Education
and Skills under Open Science was reporting a widespread lack of
training opportunities for open science in
Europe.[29] It is therefore relevant to review
selected examples of pioneering education in open science activities
held in Italy.
Pievatolo, a political philosophy scholar, gives a three-lesson course
on “Open science and research data management” at the University of
Pisa, whose presentation slides and handout text in English are freely
and openly accessible under a Creative Commons “ShareAlike” license
(for which users are free to share, copy and redistribute the material
in any medium or format, as well as adapt, remix, transform, and build
upon the material or any purpose, even
commercially).[30]
The three lessons focus on open science (“Scholarly communication and
research evaluation: the Open Science Revolution”), research evaluation
(“Irresistible proxies? Peer review and (mainstream or alternative)
bibliometric”), and academic copyright (“Copyright: taking authors’
rights seriously”). The video of a similarly relevant conference
lecture held by the same scholar at the University of Rome in 2015 is
still available online.[31]
A course on open science in the earth sciences was given by researchers
of Italy’s Institute of geophysics and volcanology by late 2020 in
collaboration with CNR, OpenAIR, and EPOS experts as a series of four
lectures held online, again with a strong orientation to practice so as
to enable the attendees to learn the tools to practice open
science.[32]
Six months later, another jointly organized online course, this time
aimed to CNR scholars and researchers in humanistic and cultural
heritage sciences, was organized again as a series of online
lectures,[33] including specific lectures on the
main EU-based research infrastructures and research projects for open
science in those disciplines (Clarin Eric for language resources and
technologies, Operas for human and social sciences, Dariah for data in
human sciences, E-rihs for interdisciplinary data in cultural heritage
sciences, and Ariadne+ and Parthenos for archeology).
In 2019 Giglia, head of the Open Science Unit at the University of
Turin, held a one-day course aimed at PhD students, librarians and
research evaluators of the University of
Messina.[34] To understand the demand of education
in open science in Italy (and in Europe) it is enough to review the
seminars (all linked to the self-archived presentation slides) given by
Dr Giglia since 2015 to date.[35]
Only in 2021, the scholar gave 26 seminars starting in early January
with a lectio magistralis inaugurating the Doctorate Schools
again at Messina’s University (“Open science, il valore della scienza
per tutti”), and ending with a seminar (“Open Science A to Z) given at
the University of Girona, in Spain, on mid December.
3. Why Italian scholars ignored open science?
According to Vianello, a work and organizational psychology professor at
the University of Padova, the two main barriers to embracing open
science practices in Italy would be culture and the extra effort needed
to disseminate knowledge according to the open science principles. “Our
burden is already heavy, pressure to publish is ridiculously high” he
wrote in 2021, so that “one really needs to be extremely motivated to
follow open science practices”.[36]
One remarkable point explaining a certain naiveté surrounding the
open science discourse has been raised by Henry commenting a 2017 study
of Masuzzo and Martens focusing on the need for researchers to learn the
new language of open science:[37]
“When you write ’One of the basic premises of science is that it should
be based on a global, collaborative effort, building on open
communication of published methods, data, and results’ you only account
for an idealistic view of science. In reality, Open science has an
enormous opportunity cost for 1. researchers themselves (hence the
importance of credit and citation) 2. institutions 3. countries (somehow
secrecy is believed to be a competitive advantage). In the past (and
still today to a large extent), science was done for the benefit
(prestige, economic or power advantage) of researchers, but also
benefactors, universities, nations, etc. not the whole community. I love
the idea that we need to insist on the ‘communism’ dimension of
research, but we should not ignore the obstacles to Open Science and the
fact that funders are mostly national agencies supporting national
interests”.[38]
We agree with Henry’s preach for realism. It is precisely the little
(and even negative) relevance of open science to the academic career
that led Italian scholars to delay the uptake of open science practices
for nearly two decades.
Italy’s researchers were (and most of them still are) unaware that by
simply self-archiving their research articles published in paywalled
journals in personal or institutional websites (granting to anyone
“green” open access) they would substantially increase the number of
citations, and therefore the impact of their research, on which they are
supposed to be evaluated.[39]
This reluctance, in brief, has been due to a widespread lack of
education on open science,[4,29] resulting in a
similarly widespread ignorance of its benefits for the academic
career.[40]
One might object that since Italian universities do not recruit
professors according to their h -index or other bibliometric
indicators,[41] Italian researchers would not be
interested in rising their citation-based metrics.
This, however, is not the case because at least the National Scientific
Qualification (ASN) necessary to take part into recruitment and
promotion process (from researcher to associate professor, and from
associate to full professor) is based on citation-based metrics of
publications in indexed academic journals.[42]
It is relevant here to notice that only in 2018 and 2019 Italy has lost
about 14,000 Italian researchers who emigrated mainly towards other
European countries and the USA, where they “find a faster career
progression and are more confident in their future than Italian
researchers in Italy”.[43]
Along with higher salaries, the shift to merit-based recruitment and
promotion processes is the solution that has long been identified to end
the emigration of Italian researchers and attract talented foreign
researchers.[43,44,45]
This is possible by expanding the research evaluation process to include
all three areas of scholarly activity (research, teaching and mentoring,
and service to society) and improving the evaluation
criteria.[7,8] Noticeably, the improvement of the
research evaluation system in the third intervention area of Italy’s
Open Science Plan (Table 1).
Table 1 . Italy’s Open Science Plan. Interventions areas and
intervention plans [Adapted from Ref.11]