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Within PathOS we are collecting stories on how Open Science (Open Access to publications, Open/FAIR data and software, collaborations with citizens) has made a positive or negative impact. Our ultimate aim is to highlight stories of Open Science practices and how these are linked to impactful outcomes. In this way, we hope to foster a learning experience and to inspire others to follow. Join us and read the first Open Science stories!

Could you briefly introduce yourself and what your Open Science story is about, including its time (e.g. year range) and location?  

I'm Alexander Refsum Jensenius, a professor of music technology at the University of Oslo, and right now I'm directing an interdisciplinary centre called RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion, which is a collaboration between departments of musicology, psychology and informatics. It is a highly interdisciplinary centre where we have people from arts and humanities, social science, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and robotics. The interdisciplinary aspect is crucial to understand the variety of projects we're doing; some of these are more humanities oriented, while others are more focused on neuroscience or technology. In general, though, we try to work on projects that are in between. By doing that, we benefit from the diverse perspectives and knowledge that different disciplines offer, but we also face challenges, such as data complexity. 

Photo Credit: Annica Thomsson

What was your role or relationship to this Open Science practice? Were you a direct participant, an observer, or something else? 

I personally prefer to call it Open Research rather than Open Science because I'm working in between art and science, and because I notice that many people on the arts and humanities side feel alienated when we call it Open Science.  

I've been doing Open Science and Open Research throughout my entire career and I'm trying to work as openly as possible everywhere. The music technology community worldwide is a very open community and has been like this since I started doing research in the early 2000s. There has been a culture of sharing code, audio files and video from the beginning. Then, I've been trying to push this culture also into the other fields that I'm working on, where this practice is not as common.  I'm trying to do all my work openly, for instance last year I personally collected data for a project on human standstill, including my own breathing, respiration, and motion patterns. I published this data online daily and maintained a public diary to share my experiences. Now, I’m writing a book that covers all these aspects. Then, of course, I am also trying to promote this approach for my PhD students and postdocs, my own research group, and also within my centre.  

Were there any quantifiable outcomes or measurable successes linked to this practice? What metrics or indicators were used to evaluate these outcomes, if any? 

Artists, musicians and game developers can and want to use our material, the issue, though, is that sometimes, if we want to openly share the multitrack files of some musician, we might face resistance of the musician or the label based on privacy and/or copyright issues. As a result, we may have to distort the sound and end up sharing a low-quality output that cannot really be used for anything meaningful afterwards.  

Anyhow, we do not have metrics to measure this outcome. Sometimes, though, it’s possible to track downloads through system logs, such as on GitHub or Open Science Framework (OSF), but it's not very easy to do it. Funders often want to quantify usage of our material so I talk to my team about the importance of having a tracking system. However, I also think it's important for the researchers to enjoy their work, focus on their research and do not spend too much time on reporting and tracking. 

What impacts, both expected and unexpected, did this practice have? Were there any surprising developments or results? 

Regarding unexpected impacts, I’ve encountered a few interesting examples. For instance, for a project I'm working on, I've been collecting a lot of ventilation noise recordings, and they are interesting for ventilation experts, who analyse different types of systems and how they sound, but also for creative people in the game industry, who want to create ventilation sound for games. In addition, I developed a video analysis system mainly used for dancers to study their movement on stage, and which turned out to be used in medical application to study the movement patterns of preterm infants, to predict whether they risk developing cerebral palsy.  

What challenges were associated with this practice, from your perspective? What lessons can be drawn from its implementation? 

We have faced several issues related to openness, particularly regarding privacy and copyrights. 

Privacy is more problematic in psychology and neuroscience, where all the studies are on people and with people. At RITMO, we mainly work with adults and healthy people, but we have some projects with minors and patients, and those are tricky from both legal and ethical perspectives. Also, in traditional humanities-oriented research, where there's a lot of interviews, handling the privacy issues becomes very complex, because for those interviews, you can try to anonymize them as much as possible, but it's very difficult to make them completely anonymous. In addition, if you're dealing with psychological data, even if they typically contain data of groups, we're often doing a lot of personal scoring, and those are tricky to publish openly. I've been trying to figure out how we can collect and aggregate data in such ways that it's possible to share it, but it's difficult to do that while keeping the data useful. When it comes to sharing these things, many people just give up because it is so difficult, but my intention is to try to share at least what we can.  

Copyright as well represents a big issue when dealing with music because a lot of the music we're dealing with is copyrighted in one way or another. There is also a combination of different types of copyright holders; sometimes people hold the copyright themselves, but in most cases professional musicians are under a label or affiliated with a rights organization handling the copyright. Also, they may have changed the label or organization during the career, which makes it more complicated. Then, of course, it's also varying from country to country. I wish we had been able to get an exemption from copyrights when it comes to research, because without that copyright impacts the research questions that we pose and that we can answer. A solution could be some kind of collective agreement like they have, for example, at the Norwegian National Broadcasting Company. That's something that could have been implemented at a national or even European level. I am not saying that musicians and composers shouldn’t get paid, so there would need to be some money in there to support freelance work. At the same time, I think we need to work towards new business models that promote sharing material, and, ultimately show this can benefit also the creative industry.  

How do you perceive this practice's influence on the wider scientific community or society? Has it affected your own views or approaches to research? 

If you go just a few years back, people were very sceptical about Open Research. Now, people are still a bit sceptical, but they do it because it is required by funders and institutions. Things are definitely improving, but this is a long-term change, it takes time, and it's good that people at least try to do it.  The general trend is that you see more openness everywhere, but there are still many challenges when moving from policy making to real-life research. In addition, in many cases people don't really know exactly what tools or systems to use, how to format their files, and so on. To address this, I wrote a paper titled “Best versus Good Enough Practices for Open Music Research,” which explores the specific challenges empirical music researchers face when adopting Open Research practices. I believe we need to start with low-hanging fruits and then gradually move towards best practices. 

Based on your experience or observation, would you recommend this Open Science practice to others? Why or why not? 

I would certainly encourage everyone to do it. It's amazing that the politicians are brave enough to actually jump into this despite they met a lot of resistance from researchers, but I still think it's the right thing to do. The big challenge now is to get the infrastructure in place; ZENODO is a good example of infrastructure that helps the researchers, but it doesn't have the same kind of tools that you have in OSF. So, we are lacking a good European based system. Additionally, of course, the research assessment process remains complicated, and we’ve been advocating for improvements in various ways. 

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Within PathOS we are collecting stories on how Open Science (Open Access to publications, Open/FAIR data and software, collaborations with citizens) has made a positive or negative impact. Our ultimate aim is to highlight stories of Open Science practices and how these are linked to impactful outcomes. In this way, we hope to foster a learning experience and to inspire others to follow. Join us and read the first Open Science stories!

Could you briefly introduce yourself and what your Open Science story is about, including its time (e.g. year range) and location?  

I am Despoina Sousoni, the Programme Manager for Impact, Innovation, and Industry at the ELIXIR Hub, the European Research Infrastructure for Bioinformatics. ELIXIR is a distributed digital infrastructure that unites bioinformaticians from 21 countries to manage data, compute, tool, and training resources across various life sciences domains, operating under Open Science principles. Most of these resources are completely open and free, often not even requiring registration. This openness, while beneficial, poses challenges when assessing the impact of these resources. Over the years, we have developed several methods to demonstrate the impact of our resources to funders, ensuring they are well-sustained through community efforts and remain open and free. As part of this journey, we did some work during the BY-COVID project (funded by EOSC, 2021 to 2024), where we demonstrated the value of open infectious disease data for industry innovation related to COVID-19. 

What was the context or background in which this Open Science practice was used? What were the goals or expected outcomes? 

The BY-COVID project was launched in autumn 2021 as part of the European Commission’s HERA incubator plan, 'Anticipating together the threat of COVID-19 variants.' The aim was to consolidate solutions, often rapidly assembled during the COVID-19 pandemic, to support the ongoing response to COVID-19 and prepare for future infectious disease outbreaks. The project aimed to make COVID-19 data easily accessible not only to scientists in laboratories but also to medical staff in hospitals, government officials, and anyone else who could benefit from it. 

One of the key tasks was industry engagement, which aimed to explore the usage and value of COVID-19 data and affiliated resources by industry. This task also aimed to demonstrate the importance of Open Data and research infrastructures during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic for developing vaccines, medicines, and other industrial products. 

The outcome of this task was a deliverable report entitled "Industry value of Infectious disease data." This report included a desktop research analysis of patents and publications that mentioned the COVID-19 data portal or at least one of its integrated biodata resources. The analysis focused on identifying industrial affiliations and analysing these companies and the inventions. The report also included statements made by industrial representatives in interviews, highlighting the integration of open biodata resources in their R&D work and their operational flexibility during the pandemic. 

What was your role or relationship to this Open Science practice? Who were the key actors involved? 

I had a leading role in the industry-related task of the BY-COVID project, with the ELIXIR Hub managing the overall project. For the industry-related task, I collaborated closely with colleagues from Uppsala University, particularly during the initial stages of industry engagement activities, when we approached companies to extract use cases. After several unsuccessful efforts, I decided to transition to desktop research, where I brought in the expertise I had built over the years from my previous Open Science work in the European Commission and UNESCO, as well as the more recent knowledge gained from the PathOS project and ELIXIR's work on the bioinformatics case study "Innovation from Open Research Resources", through the PathOS Handbook of Indicators and the Cost-Benefit Analysis conducted by CSIL. Based on this transition, we managed to create a compelling narrative for the BY-COVID partners, demonstrating the impact of Open Data on innovation during a health crisis. 

How was this Open Science practice implemented, to your knowledge?  

The transition to desktop research in this task was crucial due to the difficulties in engaging with industry representatives. Based on my experience working in Open Science over the last five years, I can easily say that the hardest Open Science topics are impact assessment and open innovation. Therefore, when I first joined ELIXIR at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic (2022) and started being involved in the BY-COVID project, I very soon saw the opportunity of building a complete story regarding the applications of Open Data in innovation in the time of a crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic. And this is what we did in this report. 

Were there any quantifiable outcomes or measurable successes linked to this practice? What metrics or indicators were used to evaluate these outcomes, if any? 

This study includes both quantitative and qualitative information to demonstrate the impact of COVID-19 open biodata resources on the operations of the private sector and COVID-19 related innovation. 

The quantitative information focuses on patent and publication analysis, along with further analysis of the affiliated industries. Over 1,000 patent mentions reference at least one of the COVID-19 Data Portal resources (5% of the total found in this search). It is worth mentioning that this number represents only the mentions of the resources' names, not the data included in the resource. 30% of these patents are affiliated with for-profit companies, with the majority of these companies being in the SME size and covering the pharma and biotech sectors. Additionally, we examined the number of citations of these patents, identifying the most impactful inventions, and analysed how many patents the identified companies had in this search (50% of the companies found had more than one patent in this search). These findings highlight the importance and successful integration of open resources in the industry sector. 

The COVID-19 Data Portal was mentioned in scientific articles, with 25 for-profit companies cited. The most cited article referred to the portal as a "great example of international collaboration for building infrastructure for a global approach." 

The qualitative information in this study includes interviews conducted during and beyond this project, as we know that innovation is not always documented in scientific publications or patent filings, and it depends on the company's mandates or operating procedures. Based on the work conducted by Lauer K.B. as part of her thesis (2022), interviewees agreed that Open Data resources, free and without restrictions, are crucial for enabling scientific discovery and benefiting society through job creation, tax contributions, and lifesaving medicines. Interviews were also conducted later in this project, aiming to understand the business operations of companies and research infrastructures that work with industry during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. All agreed that standardised data collection and sharing procedures are crucial for a rapid pandemic response, along with efforts to break the silos and build collaborative approaches in research. 

What impacts, both expected and unexpected, did this practice have? Were there any surprising developments or results? 

The immediate impact of this study has been the demonstration to funders of the socio-economic benefits of the COVID-19 Data Portal and its open resources during the pandemic. This can potentially be translated to more open research infrastructures that play a crucial role in boosting innovation in academia and industry, creating a social mandate to sustain them as open and free-of-charge resources. 

In addition to the socio-economic impact, we also observed the impact on better pandemic preparedness for the future. Some interviewees mentioned the need for standards in data collection and sharing, along with the establishment of flexible guidelines for emergency procedures. These areas are now a focus in upcoming EC-funded projects. 

What challenges were associated with this practice, from your perspective? What lessons can be drawn from its implementation? 

Despite the success and the great outcomes of the BY-COVID project, including the COVID-19 Data Portal, an infectious disease toolkit, and more (see success stories), and the continuous impact of these outcomes in pandemic preparedness (Pathogen Portal, EVORA project), the journey of the industry engagement task in the BY-COVID project was not easy and straightforward. Our initial efforts were focused around surveys and engaging through events, though the issues we identified were: 

• Industry representatives often do not see the return on investing their time in sharing experiences, or they may not have a full story to share. 
• COVID-19 research was no longer a high-level priority topic for companies, after early 2022. 
• There is not a defined methodology to assess the impact of open digital data resources in innovation. 

Therefore, we managed to extract some stories from industrial representatives regarding the usage and benefits of Open Data in their COVID-19 related work, and the combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence was the best way to demonstrate the high integration of open biodata resources in the R&D sector of companies. 

A useful insight that I have kept from this work is that not all companies are willing to mention the usage of open resources in their openly available methodological description, as it might cause replication and procedural questioning. This was an important point to understand the limitations of the information when collecting desktop data and when engaging with companies throughout the project. Therefore, my lessons learned from this work is to ensure a clear communication of the underestimation of the collected numbers due to the limitations of the used methodologies, and the need for positive referencing of the companies that mention the usage of open resources in their methodology. 

How do you perceive this practice's influence on the wider scientific community or society? Has it affected your own views or approaches to research? 

When a digital resource is completely open, it typically does not require user identification. However, this makes it challenging to track who is accessing the data and how it is being used. Additionally, quantifying the value of Open Data in innovation is difficult, as academic research often takes many years before it reaches its full potential or becomes an invention and is produced at an industrial scale. These aspects of Open Science present challenges in assessing the return on value for publicly funded infrastructures and create a continuous race to find impact stories and supplementary data to demonstrate their usage in products and services. This study is an attempt to show how we could start building some good practices and stories tackling these challenges. 

In addition, this work demonstrates the importance of collaborative efforts across domains to build a common infrastructure that benefits scientists in academia and industry, as well as medical staff in hospitals, government officials, and citizens. These topics are very hard to measure the impact of, but they are essential for the success of Open Science. 

Based on your experience or observation, would you recommend this Open Science practice to others? Why or why not? 

Definitely. It is essential to establish mechanisms to continuously monitor the usage of Open Science resources in innovation, and this study highlights that. Implementing good practices is the only way to keep up with the value of Open Data in innovation and address new challenges collectively. This study demonstrates the impact of open resources on company development and in the creation of products and services with high social value. 

Additionally, it is important to ensure positive visibility for companies that are willing to acknowledge the usage of open resources. Better understanding the industrial contributions to research and society can further encourage the adoption of Open Science practices in the private sector. 

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Do you want to share your own OS story? Join us and share your story here.

Within PathOS we are collecting stories on how Open Science (Open Access to publications, Open/FAIR data and software, collaborations with citizens) has made a positive or negative impact. Our ultimate aim is to highlight stories of Open Science practices and how these are linked to impactful outcomes. In this way, we hope to foster a learning experience and to inspire others to follow. Join us and read the first Open Science stories!

Could you briefly introduce yourself and what your Open Science story is about, including its time (e.g. year range) and location? 

Hello, I’m Natalia Mishyna, a legal researcher at the SAGE Laboratory at the University of Strasbourg and a professor of constitutional law from Ukraine.

My Open Science journey began in 2023 when I started my Marie Skłodowska-Curie MSCA4Ukraine fellowship. In Ukraine, awareness of Open Access in general, and of how it helps to share research results, raise awareness, facilitate dissemination and build networks and visibility, is practically absent, so most of the information was new to me. I studied it to meet the requirements of my fellowship.

Open Science has become a field of interest to me as a researcher, due to the opportunities it provides.

What was the context or background in which this Open Science practice was used? What were the goals or expected outcomes? 

My research aimed to explore how the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) can be implemented more effectively by local and regional authorities, particularly in crisis settings — not only in Ukraine, but across all Council of Europe member states.

The context was local self-government in Ukraine under martial law, its potential for rebuilding Ukraine after the war, and the need to rebuild democratic institutions.

Making these findings available to policymakers and researchers both in and outside Ukraine was made easier by using Open Access.

What was your role or relationship to this Open Science practice? Were you a direct participant, an observer, or something else? 

I was a direct participant. I published my MSCA-funded research via Open Access channels and managed its visibility through academic platforms and professional networks.

How was this Open Science practice implemented, to your knowledge? Who were the key actors involved? 

Open Access publication was a requirement of the funding body (the European Commission via the MSCA). I therefore ensured that my peer-reviewed articles were published in Open Access journals with the appropriate licences and were indexed in major databases such as Web of Science and Scopus. They were also made accessible through platforms such as ResearchGate and Google Scholar.

I also participated in academic conferences and workshops where sharing preliminary findings and research outputs with open audiences was encouraged. The main actors involved were the University of Strasbourg (my host institution for the MSCA project at the SAGE Laboratory) and the journals or platforms that ensured open accessibility.

Were there any quantifiable outcomes or measurable successes linked to this practice? What metrics or indicators were used to evaluate these outcomes, if any? 

Yes, before Open Access, my academic articles were hardly ever cited. However, two articles that I published in 2023 received over 20 citations each within a year, compared to a total of 41 citations for similar work published previously over a period of five years. This demonstrated a significant increase in visibility and engagement.

What impacts, both expected and unexpected, did this practice have? Were there any surprising developments or results?

One surprising outcome was an invitation to work as an expert for the Council of Europe, based on my Open Access research. I was invited to support the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe in their efforts to promote human rights under martial law in Ukraine.

I was also invited to contribute to another Council of Europe project, which was more practical in nature — the HELP programme.

Based on this assignment, in September 2024 I presented my findings on local governance and human rights implementation to the Group of Independent Experts of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities in Strasbourg. This gave me the opportunity to disseminate my findings, inspired me with further research ideas and, moreover, helped me connect with scholars from other Council of Europe member states. For example, I met Professor Annegret Eppler, a German expert affiliated with the Faculty of Law at the University of Public Administration in Kehl. Since our meeting, we have organised several events on problems relating to local self-government. I did not expect my publications to have such a strong impact at the policy level.

What challenges were associated with this practice, from your perspective? What lessons can be drawn from its implementation? 

One of the challenges I faced was learning how to promote Open Access content effectively. Initially, I had no strategy to increase visibility and underestimated the importance of having a strong digital presence. The lesson I learned is that Open Access alone isn’t enough — you also need to actively share and communicate your work to reach the right audiences.

I'm also very grateful for the opportunity to pay for open access publication using project funds. For example, I wouldn't have been able to afford the cost of publishing my chapter on local self-government in the forthcoming Springer book on sustainable development.

How do you perceive this practice's influence on the wider scientific community or society? Has it affected your own views or approaches to research? 

Open Science completely changed the way I think about research. I now view academic work as part of a broader system connecting scholars, institutions and society. Open Science facilitates collaboration and enables your research to contribute where it’s needed, including in policymaking and social recovery.

Based on your experience or observation, would you recommend this Open Science practice to others? Why or why not? 

Yes, I would recommend it, and I actually recommend it whenever I teach my Master's and PhD students. From my experience, Open Access is one of the most effective ways to ensure your work is seen, shared and referenced beyond academic circles. It enables your research to reach policymakers, civil society and professionals, who often don't have access to subscription-only journals. Open Science opens the door to real-world collaboration and visibility, and for legal researchers like me, it's a way of helping to shape changes in the society.

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