The next Open Research London event will be on Wednesday 3 October 2018 at the Francis Crick Institute, starting at 6pm.

Three speakers will talk about open science, in particular the relationship between open science and commercial activity:

• Jenny Molloy (Shuttleworth Foundation Research Fellow, University of Cambridge)
  • Open science and the future bioeconomy
• Wen Hwa Lee (Chief Scientific Officer at Action Against AMD & Programme Director Oxford Martin School)
  • Open Science – how extreme can it be?
• Tim Britton (Managing Director, Open Research Group at Springer Nature)
  • Conflict, what conflict? Where open science meets commercial interests

Eventbrite registration page and further details of talks will be available soon.

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The evening will be chaired by Veronique Birault, Director of Translation at the Francis Crick Institute.

Jenny Molloy (Shuttleworth Foundation Research Fellow, University of Cambridge)

• Open science and the future bioeconomy
  The question of how society deals with intellectual property (IP) and structures scientific institutions and communities to manage and disseminate knowledge is critically important to our future. Open science covers a broad set of practices and ways of working that aim to increase that dissemination of knowledge and which have largely focused on digital research outputs such as papers and datasets. In biotechnology, there are on-going experiments with technologies and even downstream products where open approaches to intellectual property are strategically applied to increase economic or social impact, reduce transaction costs and accelerate innovation. This talk will highlight efforts that aim to de-risk drug discovery, accelerate transitions to renewable technologies and increase equity for those in resource-poor contexts. I will describe the insights these examples might give us into the legal, economic and governance issues surrounding open technologies and their potential for building a sustainable and equitable bioeconomy, where biological knowledge is applied to innovating or improving on production of food, medicines, materials and more.
• Dr Jenny Molloy is a Shuttleworth Foundation Research Fellow in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, studying the role and impact of open approaches to intellectual property for a sustainable and equitable bioeconomy. Dr. Molloy’s work focuses on better understanding problems facing researchers accessing biological research tools in low-resource contexts, particularly Latin America and Africa. She is analysing existing innovative solutions and the potential for local, distributed manufacturing of enzymes to improve access and build capacity for biological research. The broader aim of her research is to contextualise “open source” approaches to biotechnology within current narratives of innovation and the bioeconomy policy agenda. In addition to her role in the University, she is a founding Director of two non-profit organisations ContentMine (producing open source software for text mining scientific papers) and Biomakespace (a community laboratory for engineering with biology) and she co-organises the international Gathering for Open Science Hardware.

Wen Hwa Lee (Chief Scientific Officer at Action Against AMD & Programme Director Oxford Martin School)

• Open Science – how extreme can it be?
  As Open Science gains traction, different segments of the biomedical research community have been trying to capture what it really is and how to better structure it to increase efficiency. As such, many of so called ‘open’ initiatives are simply rebranding of existing, rather closed implementations, which undermines the perception and ultimately the potential of truly Open initiatives. We will be examining the efforts of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), which has been operating an ever-increasing open model and its impact in the way Open Science is practiced in drug discovery – delicately balancing changes instatus quo and the fleeting definition of acceptable/ implementable open science.
• Lee is a molecular and structural biologist with a wide international network in drug discovery, including charities, academia, industry and government agencies. He’s been a practitioner and champion of Open Science since 2004 joining the first cohort of researchers hired by the SGC Oxford. Lee designed and led several SGC strategies and served as its Director for the Disease Foundations programme, until June 2018 when he joined Action Against Age-related Macular Degeneration as its inaugural Chief Scientific Officer.

Tim Britton (Managing Director, Open Research Group at Springer Nature)

• Conflict, what conflict? Where open science meets commercial interests
  It is often assumed that there is an automatic tension between being ‘open’ and being ‘commercial’. In publishing terms this can be stated as a perceived incompatibility between open access and subscription business models. Further, there is a move, particularly in Europe, to demand full open access for all work with senior EU officials and advisors calling for full open access to publically funded research and targeting hybrid journals as a barrier to openness. This leads to breathless talk of ‘considerable tensions’ between universities, funders and publishers: a model in crisis with commercial parties and advocates for openness purportedly in conflict. Really?Tim Britton will address this question, demonstrate how the commercial and open agenda can align; how hybrid can and should be seen as an important part of the open agenda and how the true open revolution is yet to come.
• Tim is responsible for the open research portfolio across Springer Nature which includes BioMed Central, SpringerOpen, the open access journals from Nature Research; open access monographs from Springer and Palgrave Macmillan and open data. He was previously head of strategy and transformation for PwC’s global data research and insight centre, r2i, and before that spent eight years as UK CEO and European Chief Operating Officer of YouGov.