We live in exceptional times.
There have never been more scientists on this planet than today,
and they are making scientific breakthroughs
at an exponential rate.
Every year, the world spends 2.3 trillion US dollars
to fund 8 million scientists.
We do all of this so we can live longer, healthier, and more prosperous lives.
Every year, the scientists write two million scientific articles
where they report their results.
This sounds all great, doesn’t it?
But there is a problem here that few are aware of,
but that deeply affects all of us.
The problem is that 90% of these scientific results are locked up
behind expensive paywalls.
Cures to diseases, clean energy solutions are just not widely accessible.
You, the tax-payers, have paid for this research
and yet, you can not access it.
The doctor who’s treating you today does not have access
to the latest medical studies,
and worse, even many scientists can’t read these articles
because many universities
actually can’t afford to pay all the subscription fees
to all the scientific journals out there.
Imagine: from you tax-payers money,
you pay for the highways in your country.
And then imagine a company would come along
and put up a toll gate and charge you so much money
that only the richest cars can afford to use this highway.
We would never allow this to happen on our roads, would we?
But then why,
Why are we allowing this to happen to our scientific knowledge?
The gate keeper,
the subscription journal system justifies itself
by saying that they are allowing only the highest impact studies,
the best research to pass through.
But studies have shown as well trying to predict impact is like gambling
and a serious side effect of the selection process
is that many valid studies get at first rejected
and are bounced around from journal to journal
until they finally do get published.
It happens even to the best research.
Take for example this article on graphene.
It was rejected twice and took at least one year to get published.
And then, in 2010,
this article went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
The scale of the problem is actually massive.
Of the 2 million science articles that are published every year,
at least 1 million valid research articles are first rejected and bounced.
Just one bounce delays the publication by at least six months.
And that means the total delay introduced to publish valid research
is at least 500,000 years
every single year.
It also means that researchers waste at least 100 million hours
in resubmitting their research article to another journal,
at a cost of 10 billion dollars every year.
Just imagine if researchers would use this amount of time and money
to find a solution for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, or climate change.
The good news is
there is an extremely simple solution out there today,
and it’s called open science.
In open science,
everybody in the world has the right
to access the latest research articles and the data for free.
In a closed subscription model, universities pay publishers
so that their scientists can read the articles.
In the new open science model, universities also pay publishers,
but this time,
to process all the valid research articles,
and then everybody can read for free.
And ironically, it costs much less to process articles
so universities could actually save six billion dollars every year
to do more research.
The closed subscription system comes
from these few best articles and introduces these massive delays.
The new open science model takes on the responsibility
to publish all valid research articles
and instead focuses on optimizing efficiency and quality control.
And if we were to adopt open science universally,
we could completely eliminate those 500,000 years of delay.
As a neuroscientist, I saw these problems first-hand.
Together with my husband Henry, who’s also a neuroscientist,
we decided to do something about this.
So nine years ago, we started “Frontiers”
which is an open science platform,
and today one of the largest open access publishers in the world.
Because we commit ourselves to publish all the valid science out there,
the biggest challenge that we actually face
is the following:
how do you process large amounts of articles efficiently
and at the highest quality possible?
Publishing is not the only industry
that faces this type of quality at scale challenge.
Take for example air-traffic control.
Here, the worst case scenario is a plane crash, very obviously.
[Inaudible] would translate it publishing a bad article.
The second worst case scenario is grounded planes.
[Inaudible] would mean that articles would get delayed in the pipeline.
So then how do you fly many planes safely?
The first thing that you need to fly safely is the very best pilots.
So Frontiers has only leading researchers running the journals,
currently 70,000 scientists from all the top universities:
Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford, and so forth.
Their role is to peer-review and quality control the articles.
Their role is not to select for impact.
For that, we’ve actually built online technology
that measures the readership and the impact of the articles
objectively online.
And because we do not try to predict impact
which is highly debatable,
we can also be completely transparent.
So we publish the names of the people who judge the articles,
and we link them to online profiles
so that everybody in the world can see
who reviewed, edited, and authored the articles.
That type of transparency has never been done before in publishing,
and it introduces a chain of accountability.
The next thing you need to fly safely
is standard operating procedures
at each stage of the flight
and the very best technology to enable your pilots.
Frontiers has built an online review forum
where reviewers and authors can interact with each other.
We’ve automated all the quality checks, and we’ve built an online cockpit
so that editors are actually alerted
to tasks and quality checks that require their attention,
while in the background,
thousands of work flows guide the articles through the pipeline.
Does this model work?
Yes, it does.
Very occasionally,
a bad paper may slip through because no system or human is foolproof,
but we actually use these occasions
to improve or operating procedures and the quality checks.
Overall, open science works extremely well.
I’m going to illustrate this on two examples: “Frontiers”
and the Public Library Of Science also called PLOS
which is one of the very first open science pioneers.
The success of open science can be measured through quality and impact.
We’re going to start looking at quality first.
Here is what you can do:
you can compare the citation rates of journals to each other.
When you do that,
you’ll find that open access journals are amongst the top most cited journals
in the world.
Take for example PLOS ONE.
This is a multi-disciplinary open access journal
which was started at the National Institutes of Health
about ten years ago,
and within record time,
this became the largest journal in the world.
PLOS ONE articles receive as many citations
as three of the world’s oldest and most famous science journals combined.
Let’s look at “Frontiers.”
“Frontiers” publishes the two most cited psychology journals in the world,
the most cited neuroscience publishing program,
and the second most cited physiology journal in the world.
Quality obviously works.
Let’s look at readership impact.
The 60,000 articles published so far,
received more than 250 million views from all over the world;
massively in Europe and the US, India, Latin America,
and most strikingly,
some of the most reading areas are economic hubs
because we are today in the fourth industrial revolution.
Most companies today
weather they are small or big alike,
they all depend on technological and scientific innovation
to survive and to thrive.
Today’s economy is a knowledge economy.
In this context,
having efficient and open access to the latest science is important
not just for the innovation cycle but for economic growth as well.
The best example to illustrate this is actually the Human Genome Project.
Here, at first, there were serious attempts to patent genes
as well as lock them away behind expensive subscription paywalls.
But luckily for all of us,
it was decided to make the Human Genome an open resource.
The impact of that has been enormous.
The Open Gene Databases have been use by geneticists
to design the first gene-editing therapies for cancer.
And for every dollar invested, 145 dollars were made in return.
The Human Genome Project catalyzed the entire biotech industry
which today is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars
every single year.
So then,
why do we need open science so urgently?
Why now?
What makes me get out of bed every morning
and build an open science platform like “Frontiers”
is actually very simple:
I want my children to live on a healthy planet,
a planet where bees and frogs are not just things that you see
in the Natural History Museum.
We are out of time to debate climate change.
We have to be implementing those solutions right now.
For that, we need access to our latest science results.
Over the past ten years,
a range of remarkable pioneers
research institutions, funders, policy makers,
all brought to life open science.
But the reality is that still today,
90% of our latest science results remain locked up.
And if they remain locked up and delayed,
those solutions may just not come in time.
So just imagine
if we had full access to our latest science
how that would accelerate innovation, economic growth,
and all the solutions that we need for a sustainable future.
There have never been more scientists on this planet than today.
they’ve never had more resources. they’ve never made more discoveries.
We are today in a better position to solve any type of problem
than ever before in human history.
And science can bring us clean energy,
sustainable cities, and healthy food,
and we can make more money in the process.
So yes, we can have it all.
Let’s just do it now.
Let’s make our science open.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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