Open Science and Industry

Abstract

Adding Open Science to the Modern Discovery and Applications Toolbox in Crystallography: Open Science and Industry
John R. Helliwell, Department of Chemistry, University of Manchester, UK

UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science (https://www.unesco.org/en/open-science/about?hub=686  ), often underrepresents industry’s role despite its prominence in addressing societal challenges, as emphasized by UN SDG9 (https://www.globalgoals.org/goals/9-industry-innovation-and-infrastructure/ ). Industry leverages facilities like synchrotron services under strict confidentiality, which are essential to their innovation process. This has been a great enthusiasm of mine at SRS Daresbury through my whole 30 years career there. Likewise, I have done this in my advisory roles supporting all the newer synchrotron, and neutron, facilities in encouraging their providing access of their facilities to industry. In a nutshell, society needs industry, which is a public good! Consumers of course need to be critical of the products on offer and governments need to regulate to protect the consumer.

Open science actually can mean a variety of things and care is needed to be sure what meaning is intended at events, besides UNESCO and the UN, but hosted as well by CODATA and the Research Data Alliance. In the broadest sense, Open Science would address neglected areas like tropical disease drug development, which lacks traditional market incentives for industry. In such cases, a fully open collaborative approach (see eg Miedema 2022), supported by UNESCO and WHO, could accelerate breakthroughs. Another situation can involve pre-competitive, open, collaborations between companies, such as the Industrial Macromolecular Crystallography Association’s beamlines at the Advanced Photon Source. Also, for societally very urgent disease challenges such as covid-19, industry and academia can work fully openly and/or not for profit. Preprints have been a focus for the funding agencies in recent years but risk undermining trust and even mislead as their data are rarely provided with a preprint (Helliwell 2024).

The uptake of open science resources in industry may well vary e.g. according to the size of a company, SMEs through to large conglomerates. Certainly, more knowledge is required from industry itself of its views as recognised by such as the EU (https://on-merrit.eu/news/2021-12-16-os-resources-industry/#fnref:2).

References

Helliwell, J.R., 2024. The Scientific Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth. CRC Press.

Miedema, F., 2022. Open science: The very idea (p. 247). Springer Nature.