Progress report of open science consultation of the global crystallography community

A year ago, I presented a report in the IUCr Newsletter about UNESCO’s and the International Science Council’s extensive work to promote and indeed reform societal approaches to science research (Helliwell, 2024). These efforts being much wider than reform of open access to journals, I felt the need for a chance for our community to feedback on what this means for us. I advertised my report on the IUCr Committee on Data’s Public Forum because it is our many decades community practice to link our data to our publications up to the limit of what technology allows; i.e. firstly atomic coordinates, then structure factors and most recently diffraction images themselves have become possible. This CommDat public forum post has been accessed more than 70,000 times. What are the outcomes of my Consultative Report thus far, then?

The debate on whether raw data sets of yet unpublished studies should be released, typically after a three-year privileged access to the measuring team (the 'embargo period'), has moved on in mainland Europe (see Murphy et al., 2025) and is now formal policy. This is a policy accepted by European facility users before any data are measured by a PI and their team. So, in Europe, just who does own research data (https://forums.iucr.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=445) is more than the intellectual property of a PI (and their scientific hypothesis). This I see as a controversial step, obviously except where it is consented to. Industry usage of beam time is accepted as being exempt. Citizen science projects, I see, are obviously keen on all measured data being made open, even from the moment of measurement, like the Human Genome Project did. This would include research on neglected tropical diseases, which rely principally on academic efforts rather than industry.

Publication and journal reform have not stopped at Gold Open Access (free for readers) and have indeed been pushing towards Diamond Open Access (free for both authors and readers) (see https://diamasproject.eu/). The IUCr has already proactively operated this way with its Newsletter. For formal publication also, many times per year the IUCr operates a fee waiver system where authors under documented hardship apply to publish their science in IUCrJ, Acta Cryst E, IUCrData or JSR (our fully open access titles) and such requests are granted to as many as required up to where the IUCr Journals’ funds allow.

UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) hosted a hybrid two-day conference from July 7 to 8, 2025, to monitor progress (https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/open-science-monitoring-progress-assessing-impact). I attended this. There was a broad spectrum of contributions ranging from economic impacts assessment by the EU PathOS project (PathOS, 2024) with cost-benefit analyses, the EU’s overview of the Research Performing Organisations and Research Funding Organisations, through to UNESCO’s national members’ reports on open science implementations. The latter provided a global coverage. There was a launch of the Open Science Monitoring by Principles; these included the strange assertion that reproducibility of science required open science, which, in my experience in pre-publication peer review of an article and its underpinning data, is between an editor and the referees alone. The Questions to panellists included “What is the sustainability of all this?” and “What account has been taken of doctoral students and early career researchers’ privileged access to their data?”. The high level of the discussions was above such questions at present. There were no speakers from industry who, as well as their perspectives on open science, could have had a chance to comment on the EU’s cost-benefit analyses mentioned above. Eleonora Colangelo has written a summary of the UNESCO meeting and it also has a link to the full sessions recordings: Enablers, co-creation, causality: a vision for open science - Research Information [researchinformation.info]. The International Science Council (ISC) has a curated newsletter, Open Science round-up, that provides an overview of the latest developments and initiatives shaping the global open science landscape (ISC, 2025).

Meanwhile, my own investigations, beyond UNESCO’s Open Science Monitoring efforts, have continued. A significant impact on me is the book Open Science, the very idea by Professor Dr Frank Miedema of Utrecht University [Miedema (2022); this book, published by Springer, is itself open access]. Frank Miedema has had a very successful career in biochemistry and immunology, focusing on HIV/AIDS research. He explained his laboratory’s high-impact research (which he had published behind the paywalls of Nature and Science) to a gay community that could not access the articles and did not even see the relevance of his discoveries. This was an epiphany moment for him, in which he realised that funding agencies, as well as he, should listen more acutely to the communities that would benefit from a research proposal, or simply define the proposals themselves as principal stakeholders (PS) to which PIs could sign up. This links with the issue of tension between pure and applied research, competing for the limited funding, which low grant proposal success rates exacerbate. Governments are increasingly steering us toward applied, yet still fundamental, research, with industry developing the products for consumers as the ultimate beneficiaries. More specific to his own research community, Frank Miedema laments the lack of data sharing with its publications that he has witnessed over the years, a situation we as a crystallographic community would regard as scandalous. Not least, I personally would regard those as irreproducible article submissions and not worth my time, when serving as editor, sending to referees or agreeing to be a referee myself. Today, rectifying the reproducibility of an article is regarded, it seems, as a triumph of open science rather than simply maintaining necessary standards.

Let’s not forget, this consultation is still ongoing. As per my Newsletter piece last year, our community’s open science efforts in areas such as citizen science and publishing must surely continue and expand. Compared with other research communities, we can be proud of our data being FAIR, dating back to Bragg (1913), who published his raw (Laue) diffraction images and also his hkl scans on his father’s X-ray spectrometer. Then, the CSD and PDB over the past few decades continued the tradition into the digital age. Our crystallographic associations can though emulate the British Crystallography Association’s Industrial Group (https://industrial.crystallography.org.uk) bringing the academic and industrial crystallography communities together to discuss matters such as data sharing, as will take place on the final day of the next International Data Week 'IDW2025' in the session entitled Dataspaces: Enabling Academic and Industrial Research Data Sharing Management at Scale, https://idw2025.org/program-at-a-glance/. Such a link to industry I have emphasised at the UNESCO and ISC’s horizon scanning discussions that I have attended these past two years. My inputs are in clear accord with the United Nation’s Sustainability Goal 9 on Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (United Nations, 2015), recognising therefore what the current research system achieves on behalf of all in the world for the public good. This whole system of science has evolved over the past three centuries. Frustrations with the current landscape of funding hierarchies and the research process generally are highlighted by UNESCO, the ISC and others, such as Miedema’s book, which each document a wish for wholesale reform, whereas I am countering this with suggestions for specific areas for improvement.

Looking back over the decades, data sharing among crystallographers has progressed as expeditiously as advances in data storage technology have allowed, as I remarked at the start of this article. The leadership of crystallography in the wider data communities has been recognised by the CODATA Prize in 2014 to Professor Sydney Hall from Perth, Australia (https://codata.org/codata-prize-2014-awarded-to-professor-sydney-hall/), and the Association of Learned and Professional Publishers Prize in 2006 to IUCr Journals for its innovations in data exchange and data quality (https://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/volume-14/number-3/alpsp-award). These and other pioneering contributions in facilitating data sharing of quality by our PIs to ensure trust in a scientific finding would today be termed open science, also previously known as the global commons (see e.g. Warren et al., 2008). We also facilitate industry results sharing with initiatives such as the launch of Acta Cryst F for protein-ligand crystal structures screening papers (Einspahr & Guss, 2005). Today, our IUCr efforts continue with facilitating quality raw data sharing by our PIs with the IUCrData Raw Data Letters new section (Main Editor, Dr Loes Kroon-Batenburg), thus further pushing the ‘open science’ frontier at high quality (Kroon-Batenburg, Helliwell & Hester, 2022). It is also worth reiterating the IUCr Journals' commitment to open software, over many decades, as per the notes for authors: “A web page about the program (including, where applicable, documentation, contacts to developers and links to download the software itself) should also be available.”; see a recent example of my own (Hao et al., 2021). Indeed, UNESCO are in accord with quality of scientific outputs requirements, e.g. quoting from their Recommendations on Open Science (UNESCO, 2023) they state in their Values and Integrity section, albeit not a specific proposal, the opportunity of a more open science generally of: “making evaluation of scientific methods and outputs more transparent and accurate”.

Pivotal within our global crystallography approach, facilitated by the IUCr, is the central role of the PI in choosing when and what to publish. This has worked exceptionally well but not perfectly as the fortunately very few cases of falsified structures and data led to publications in Acta Cryst E that had to be retracted (Harrison, Simpson & Weil, 2010). The practicalities of a PI’s raw data being released after a 3-year embargo period, mainland Europe's new policy, do promote a much wider open science, this cannot be denied, even though I think this will swamp the community since the PI’s judgement as a primary filter of when to publish a study is being sidestepped. Others argue against me that AI will sweep through these automatically released open raw data sets and pick up on projects that PIs have given insufficient priority to publishing those results promptly enough. These pros and cons will be debated in the planned Global Open Science Workshop and Microsymposium of the IUCr Committee on Data at the IUCr Calgary Congress next year.

Overall, there is a gushing enthusiasm for 'open science' from the organisations, although they do not seem keen to test various practicalities such as sustainability, industry, scientists in training or refereeing procedures as detailed above. This is fine in principle, but it seems they are just not ready to face the details. 

References

Bragg, W. L. (1913). The structure of some crystals as indicated by their diffraction of X-rays. Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. A 89, 248–277.

Colangelo, E. (2025) Report “UNESCO-hosted strategic event on open science monitoring and impact held in Paris” https://www.researchinformation.info/analysis-opinion/enablers-co-creation-causality-a-vision-for-open-science/  published by Research Information Network. 

Einspahr, H. & Guss, M. (2005). Editorial. Acta Cryst. F61, 1–2.

Hao, Q., Harding, M. M., Helliwell, J. R. & Szebenyi, D. M. (2021). Weblinks for the Daresbury Laue software source code and information. Addendum. J. Synchrotron Rad. 28, 666.

Harrison, W. T. A., Simpson, J. & Weil, M. (2010). Editorial. Acta Cryst. E66, e1–e2.

Helliwell, J. R. (2024). Adding Open Science to the modern discovery and applications toolbox in crystallography, IUCr Newsletter, https://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/volume-32/number-2/adding-open-science-to-the-modern-discovery-and-applications-toolbox-in-crystallography. 

ISC (2025). Open Science round-up, https://council.science/news/open-science-round-up-june-2025/.

Kroon-Batenburg, L. M. J., Helliwell, J. R. & Hester, J. R. (2022). IUCrData launches Raw Data Letters. IUCrData, 7, x220821.

Miedema, F. (2022). Open Science: the very idea. Springer Nature. [p. 247]

Murphy, B. M., Götz, A., Gutt, C., McGuinness, C., Rønnow, H. M., Schneidewind, A., Deledda, S. & Pietsch, U. (2025). FAIR data - the photon and neutron communities move together towards open science. IUCrJ, 12, 8-15.

PathOS (2024). Open Science impact indicator handbook, https://handbook.pathos-project.eu/.

United Nations (2015). The Global Goals - Goal 9: industry, innovation and infrastructure, https://globalgoals.org/goals/9-industry-innovation-and-infrastructure/.

UNESCO (2023). UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, https://www.unesco.org/en/open-science/about.

Warren, J. E., Diakun, G., Bushnell-Wye, G., Fisher, S., Thalal, A., Helliwell, M. & Helliwell, J. R. (2008). Science experiments via telepresence at a synchrotron radiation source facility. J. Synchrotron Rad. 15, 191–194.