This post was co-authored with Christoper Brown and Neil Jacobs (Jisc), Josh Brown and Laure Haak(ORCID), and Clifford Tatum (SURF)
The landscape of research information is largely closed to us. We rely on original research to solve many of the challenges facing humanity, to improve lives, and to advance human understanding, and we invest in it accordingly. However, when we survey the map of our research world it is filled with gaps. We pass along a few well-trodden roads (too often paying a substantial toll for the privilege) and we can only wonder about what lies just over the horizon.
We can point to many contributing factors: business models that militate against the sharing of information; aggregation of research analytics for local strategic purposes; technological barriers to linking information between sources; cultural practices that reward and privilege a small slice of research activity; and systems that emphasise hard sciences and anglophone literature. Any and all of these can, and do, hide some of the richness of research endeavour. However, these systemic challenges are not the focus of this discussion. Instead, our focus is on the gaps in our understanding of the landscape: the empty parts of the research map.
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