Community over Commercialisation?

Today marks the start of International Open Access Week 2024! Throughout the week, we’ll be sharing insights from UCL staff on how open access is shaping research, collaboration, and scholarship across the university. To kick off the series, Kirsty Wallis explores the significance of this year’s theme and the challenges and opportunities of balancing openness with commercialisation in ways that benefit both research and society.

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The theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (OA Week), “Community over Commercialisation,” intends to provide a starting point for us to reflect on the importance of community in the work that we do relating to Openness, rather than letting financial or commercial interests take focus.

This is the second year focusing on this theme, which shows its significance in Open Science and Scholarship and the growing interest in these discussions.

The UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science highlight the issues of groups profiting from publicly funded research and advocate for non-commercial, collaborative publishing models.

This year’s OA Week invites reflection on critical questions around commercialisation, corporate control of knowledge and what we can do to encourage a shift towards more open practices. This post will focus on the progress in opening up research worldwide, but also bring to the fore some areas where commercialisation may be able to serve the public interest. Can commercialising research ever be for public good?

Last year in support of the theme, we launched our Citizen Science Community! It was the culmination of a lot of work from the team in the Office for Open Science and Scholarship. Our approach to Citizen Science at UCL foregrounds the need to prioritise community interests and aiming to make everything we do as inclusive as possible and integrate as many subject areas as we can.

We also explored how Creative Commons (CC) licences promote open, reusable research, making scholarly outputs accessible to a wider audience—from researchers to the general public.

International Open Access Week has created a list of profiles of global institutions showcasing how Open Science communities are embedding principles of shared knowledge and equitable access into their practices: visit the International Open Access Week list of Theme Profiles.

Continuing the Discussion in 2024:

As we move forward, OA Week 2024 offers the opportunity to build on the 2023 theme and further explore how community-based approaches can coexist with commercial interests in ways that serve both the research community and the public. Turning this dialogue into concrete action is essential for achieving the goals of Open Science—making knowledge accessible and equitable for everyone.

So, is there ever a scenario where commercialisation of research can work for community? After all, it is possible to share the outputs of research openly while also selling them as a product, for example in software. It is possible and even fairly common in some areas to make the underlying code open source but sell access to supported versions or additional features that can be used by companies and businesses that are unable to support products themselves. There are many examples of this, from the underlying code supporting Android phones and Chrome browsers to the Linux operating system and, also the ePrints repository software that we use here at UCL.

As another example, this time from within UCL itself is the Ventura CPAP Machine developed during 2020 at the height of the pandemic. The designs for the machine were made available free of charge via the UCLB licensing system. This enabled limitations to be put in place for who could use the designs, preventing companies from profiteering from the design while making it available to hospitals and other charitable organisations to build and test their own free of charge. It has always been UCL’s position that profit is not the end game, going back as far as Jeremy Bentham, the spiritual founder of UCL, who believed that education should be more widely available, a core underpinning value of UCL and the Office for Open Science and Scholarship today.

This year’s Open Access Week theme aligns with some of the behind-the-scenes work we’re doing to explore the relationship between openness and commercialisation and investigate scenarios where they may not be as much in conflict as the theme suggests. Keep an eye out for the report and recommendations coming later this academic year!