The credibility of medical research will grow as peak funding agencies expand requirements for open access approaches.
The National Health and Medical Research Council’s new Open Science Policy requires researchers to “share their data and methods as openly as possible.” It also applies to the Medical Research Future Fund and covers the “entire research cycle.”
The policy applies from this month and includes “data collection, management and storage,” plus “analyses, reflection and interpretation.” Data must be available under the FAIR principles – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable – and will be available for all to use, as long as the original author(s) are credited. There is a variation that provides Indigenous Australians with authority over their data.
This is a transformative change in open access from the previous emphasis on publication. The NHMRC had substantively dealt with that in 2022, when it required research it funds be free to read.
The new policy is about the credibility of content, with the expectation that it will be harder for researchers to fudge, or fabricate findings.
The new policy also aligns Australia with the US and UK on using Persistent Identifiers which make data identifiable everywhere. This, the NHMRC understatedly suggests, could be useful in a “public health emergency.”
Gosh, whatever could they have in mind?