The benefits of open science are multifold. It fosters transparency and efficiency of research and encourages collaborations and maximum resource utilisation. Overall, open science stimulates economic growth and meaningful scientific interventions in public lives. If we can adapt the practices of open science, it will be beneficial to guide the Indian research system towards higher competitiveness and quality. Researchers from the publicly funded Universities should share research publications and more importantly, research data, which includes negative results as well. More engagement/ dialogue between researchers and the public must be encouraged to make research more societal-need driven. There is an urgent need to stop relying on a “one-sided evaluation system” based on research articles and journal impact factors for research evaluation, funding. More importantly, the very fundamental of research projects must be the need of the society, not driven by the research choices of high impact commercial journals.

Free flow of science will help promote a transparent, collaborative and inspirational research process. The advancement of digital technologies has created online platforms to organise and publish the results of research projects, scientific publications and large data sets and make them available to a broader scientific community, potential users from the MSME sectors and the public in general. Cross-discipline learning and collaboration became a reality with the advancement of technologies. However, only a smaller section of the scientific community has woken up to support the causes of open science. We need wider participation to make open science a reality. It is very much true for India as well. We are far behind in adopting the open science practices. Nurturing open science will need some push from the system to make the researchers adopt open science practices.  It’s high time for us to embrace the concepts of open science. Open science can potentially navigate the current research ecosystem from publications driven to societal need driven.

For more information, please contact Dr. Momita Koley- moumitakoley@iisc.ac.in