When Martin Delahunty started work as a science publisher in the early 1990s, he didn’t even have access to a computer. “The senior exec had a computer, but I was given a red pen, a blue pen, an in-tray, an out-tray, and a paper manuscript.”
Thirty years later, Delahunty has seen incredible changes in scientific publishing, and now runs a London-based independent consultancy that helps publishers embrace the open access, open science world. He tells some of their successful stories through his Inspiring STEM podcast.
Growing up on a diet of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough, Delahunty initially considered being a marine biologist, completing a natural sciences degree at Trinity College, Dublin. “But the reality is, coming out of Ireland, there are limited choices in terms of being a marine biologist,” he says. “If I was in Australia and adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef, then who knows, it could have been a completely different story.”
After a short stint working as a research technician in a children’s hospital, he registered for a PhD, but quickly realised that laboratory science and academia wasn’t his bag. Instead, he was introduced to science publishing, working for British publishing company, Butterworth Heinemann. “I was taught quite early on that the research that’s submitted to the journals I was managing is a very precious piece of work,” says Delahunty. “That paper manuscript we received was probably four or five years of work from a particular research group. So, we had to treat it with care and attention.”
At the time, ‘digitisation’ of content consisted of sticking a 5.25-inch floppy disc onto the front cover of a journal. “Hopefully, somebody had a disc drive and the inclination to use that disc to read the content,” Delahunty says.
Free and unfettered access
In the ensuing years, the development of the World Wide Web revolutionised a more democratic way of disseminating scientific information. “The founding principle of the web was that there should be free and unfettered access to content, and it should facilitate open knowledge exchange,” says Delahunty.
In particular, scientific information that could benefit others should be freely available. “The argument was that it didn’t make any sense for us, as taxpayers, in whichever country we are, to support scientific research that then is locked behind a subscription firewall where we have no rights to access that,” says Delahunty.
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) journal was one of the earliest adopters of an open access publishing model in the early 2000s. “But they, amongst the traditional publishers, would’ve been seen as experimenters and disruptors,” says Delahunty.
Traditional science publishers were struggling with how to generate profit while allowing open access. “PLoS had quite significant philanthropic funding from a number of funders that supported and underwrote the operating costs,” says Delahunty. “They grew very, very quickly on the back of that and continued to be very successful as a fully open-access publisher. Actually, the open access business has now proven to be equally profitable, and more efficient in terms of business processes. Funders are literally saying, ‘You may be Nature, but if you don’t offer open access, then we can’t publish with you’. So, not to be able to publish pivotal, groundbreaking research, which is the bread and butter of Nature, that’s obviously a threat to their business.”
From 2008, Delahunty worked for the Nature Publishing Group, developing the Nature Partner Journals across the world, under an open access framework.
The best term now is ‘open science’, because ‘open access’ is just the publication mechanism,” he says. “To achieve global goals, we need global participation and facilitation of advancing science and multidisciplinary science practices.”
For example, Delahunty says, building resilient and sustainable cities requires architects to team up with engineers, digital scientists and researchers in the social sciences and humanities to think about how an environment can support various aspects of a community’s wellbeing.
In 2017, Delahunty started his independent publishing business, Inspiring STEM Consulting, which helps organisations understand the challenges and opportunities of open science and open science publishing. “Open access publishing is fully embedded in Europe,” he says. “In other regions of the world, it’s still beginning to gain traction and publishers are maybe a little bit behind the curve. I’m helping them to try and accelerate and benchmark with publishers that have made that move towards open access very successfully.”
Data curators
Delahunty says one of the biggest changes at the moment in science publishing is rethinking how to curate the data that is within research – breaking it down into elements that can be easily searched for by humans or artificial intelligence systems.
“If you publish an article, open access, and say, ‘Well, our job’s done,’ that’s not enough, because the content needs to be discoverable, it needs to be to be accessible and potentially transformed,” says Delahunty.
“What we are getting to is a scientific publishing ecosystem where, at the centre of that, it’s not a journal, it’s not an article, but it’s data, it’s datasets. We’re not just talking about text data, we’re talking about underlying research data. We’re talking about other data that comes in through the ecosystem that researchers create, from the very first set of laboratory experiments.”
As part of this trend, the importance of peer-reviewed journal articles is decreasing, as people can access data in much quicker timeframes. “We now have, particularly during and post-COVID, the sudden advent of the pre-print server,” says Delahunty. “These are non-peer-reviewed research articles. It’s work that has been made available through a public open repository.”
During the pandemic, such repositories greatly accelerated the dissemination of the earliest COVID-19 research, which had a direct influence in the rapid development of vaccines and management protocols. “A peer-reviewed article would have to go through a peer-review process that might take weeks or months,” says Delahunty.
Taking the emphasis away from peer-reviewed journals may also help research funders achieve the original goals of the research. “Who is your primary audience?” Delahunty asks researchers. “Who do you want to influence? Consider the right publication media. A journal may not be the absolute best route for disseminating your work. It may be a public repository for your data. It may be GitHub or it may be Figshare.”
All of this fits with what Delahunty believes the role of modern scientific publisher should be: “To curate, to annotate, to add value, and then to disseminate widely and create impact.”
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Story by Kylie Ahern
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