Recently Open Science became a buzz word in many research communities, and practically everyone sees Open Science as a key to future research work. The main idea of Open science is to make research and its results opened to society of all levels. However, it is not exactly clear what every community understands by the term «Open Science». It looks like the movement is very broad and once we start talking about exact terms, many people can agree only with a part of it. 

As it was mentioned by multiple speakers during the workshop, simply sharing the data and results is not enough to make science «open». Some information such as biomedical data cannot be shared publicly. Other results publication is limited by laws or national security. If we think about patents, it was an early-stage movement towards Open Science, but it also became a reason for such issues like «patent trolls» or «patent wars». I support the idea of sharing data and publications not only from publicly funded research but from every research group that is able and willing to share it. Nevertheless, international society has to find the right solution that would fit all the groups involved without leaving wormholes for abusing these ideas, and it sounds already very challenging. 

During the workshop, it was also mentioned that one of the greatest enemies of Open Science is citation index, though I doubt that anyone can call a higher «h2» as the main motivation for their work. These metrics are not the best way to measure the performance of research groups or individuals, but it is the only one that we have now. I believe that the only good metric is the results themselves, yet evaluation of these results is a huge amount of work and to the best of my knowledge currently, there is no unified method that is appropriate for various scientific fields and countries. Many groups are offering their solutions, but this is the gap that has to be filled globally before we deny using the current metrics. In the majority of serious scientific institutes today the assessment of the researchers’ work is conducted based on these indicators, therefore we cannot simply cancel them and encourage scientists to publish in unknown open access journals without providing any additional motivation. 

I also had the feeling that many people misunderstand the idea of open science as free access to its results, free as in beer. It is clear that the research system is changing already, but the management of this process costs a fortune, from the attraction of good research communities to open-access journals, to the maintenance of infrastructure. Someone has to pay for it, and the one who will find this money will be the one who manages the process. Clearly, these enormous funds have to be a result of communication and collaboration between many countries, industries and governments, and last but not least, crowdsourcing. 

In my opinion, most of the scientists already share the ideals of Open Science. I can call myself an open scientist because my goal (and I believe a goal of every good scientist in the world) is to do high-quality research and disseminate the results as broad as possible. A discussion of how exactly we can make it really «open» is indeed important, but I hope to hear a call for a real implementation as soon as possible.