Rob Johnson – “This is an edited transcript of a keynote given at the International Conclave on eScience and Digital Libraries on 28 January 2021 on the topic of Open Science and Scholarly Communication. The slides are available here.

I’ve been fortunate in my career to participate in discussions in numerous countries and at all levels of the research and scholarly communication system, often with a focus on making the transition to open science. I want to outline three key lessons I’ve learned from these experiences, and explore how these relate to the scholarly communications landscape in India – particularly, the emerging Science Technology and Innovation Policy, and the Open Science Framework it proposes…Scholarly communication is itself a complex system. Complex systems can be found in both nature and society, and are systemic in nature, meaning you cannot take one part of the system and understand it in isolation, without looking at the other parts. We cannot look at scholarly communication in India in isolation from the rest of the world because the rest of the world impacts on scholarly communication in India and what happens in India influences what happens in the rest of the world. Nor can we look at entities such as a journal, a researcher or a discipline in isolation from the rest, because the scholarly communication system is comprised of myriad of individual one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships….”