How Can Open Science Practices Increase Trust In Research?

Why It Matters

Greater openness in research could improve reproducibility, accelerate discovery and restore public confidence, but requires aligning incentives, infrastructure and communication strategies across academia and media. Without that alignment, the benefits of transparency risk being undermined by misinterpretation, perverse incentives or uneven adoption.

Summary

A virtual panel convened experts across research, preprints and open-notebook initiatives to explore how open science practices can rebuild public trust in research as academic publishing and media converge online. Panelists traced open science from informal pre-war scholarship through postwar funded peer review to today’s push for transparency—sharing data, methods, preprints and lab notebooks—to speed correction, reproducibility and equitable credit. They argued open practices shift science from a closed, competitive model toward a public-good, collaborative model, while acknowledging tensions with media dynamics, incentives and governance. The discussion aimed to surface practical pathways and remaining obstacles rather than offer definitive solutions.

Original Description

The open science movement is changing the way research is published, providing new methods of dissemination and evaluation like preprints and open review that are accelerating the pace and transparency of science. At the same time, these new, more open methods of communicating science threaten to expose the publication process to bad actors keen on weaponizing science for political purposes, spreading misinformation, or publishing junk research to advance their careers. This panel brings together representatives from each stage of open science, from active researchers to open publishing platform developers and journalists for a frank discussion of how each part of the publishing process must adapt to make sure open science advances not just science itself, but society’s understanding of, trust in, and willingness to invest in research.

Panelists share:

- New trends in open science and how they will change the way policymakers, journalists, and the public encounter, make sense of, and ultimately trust science.

- Potential risks posed by the adoption of open science and how researchers and publishers can work with journalists and policymakers to mitigate them.

- Why researchers are adopting open science, and what it means for the future of access to scientific knowledge.

Lessons learned from the news media’s history with free online publishing, and what the academic publishing community can take and adapt from them.

Panelists:

Richard Sever is Chief Science and Strategy Officer (CSSO) at openRxiv, the non-profit organization that runs the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv. Richard studied for an undergraduate degree in biochemisty at the University of Oxford, before obtaining a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Cambridge for his PhD. He then trained as an editor, working first at Current Opinion in Cell Biology and then Trends in Biochemical Science.

Needhi Bhalla is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She attended graduate school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she trained with Dr. Andrew Murray and studied how mitotic chromosomes segregate in budding yeast.

Rachel Zamzow is an award-winning science journalist and editor. She’s the managing editor of The Open Notebook (TON), a nonprofit organization that supports the global community of journalists who cover science.

Moderator:

Gabriel Stein is a technologist, developer, and writer who has been interested in the intersection of culture and technology since he taught himself to code in middle school to build an online roleplaying game. He is the Head of Platform at Knowledge Futures, a non-profit that builds public digital infrastructure to make information useful.