Jacob Fokkema

From 2002 until Januari 2010 Jacob Fokkema was rector magnificus of Delft University of Technology. He was also Professor of Applied Geophysics at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam.

Are technologists familiar with Open Access?
Definitely! It’s a development that’s highly relevant to us. We use the Internet to make our courses available to the global community. We see that as a duty to society and – after MIT – we are the biggest provider of 'Open Course Ware'. It’s a matter of efficient knowledge transfer. Mach once said that his value as a professor was in economical thinking: “In the course of a single university term, I can explain something that I’ve been thinking about for thirty years.” Information technology can reinforce that process. For example: students can now watch our lectures anywhere and at any time. The quality has improved because teaching staff now get presentation training. The recorded lectures are listed on their CV, and they make teaching a bigger part of their career. The striking thing is that students still come to lectures, not so much to actually see the lecture – they can do that at home – but so they can take things that bit further through questions and discussion. OpenCourseWare has encouraged more students to come to Delft. We also use the lectures in our exchange programmes, for example with Ching Hua University, and for our solar cell projects in Africa. We’ve been doing that for two years now. I’d seen it at MIT and I wanted Delft to do the same thing. People were a bit cautious at first, on the lines of “This is mine and we mustn’t give it away.” We had to discuss things. But now the teaching staff think it’s fantastic.

How about access to scientific articles?
Technology research is research within a context, and that demands different media. Right from when I became the Rector of the university, for example, I have concerned myself with the quality of the research at our architecture faculty. Just what constitutes creative intelligence, which is so difficult to express in hard figures? Architects don’t have a Hirsch index (h-index) or publications in Nature, and so forth. But the essential thing about scientific journals – communicating with your peers and exchanging ideas – is relevant for architecture too. In the design-based disciplines – and all technical disciplines are basically design-based – it’s extremely important to assess each individual step in the design process. You constantly weigh things up and then you arrive at well-founded decisions that you can build on. The truth doesn’t appear all at once – it involves a process of iteration. That process needs to be made visible, backed up, and made open to comments. Open Access offers far more options for that than publishing finished results accompanied by theoretical reflection, as in “traditional” journals. Open Access is much more in line with the dynamism of the creative process. You register and evaluate the process much more. With design, the progress of the process and the interaction with your peers is a significant part of the result. The demands of quality and accountability still apply in full, but Open Access can make the process more transparent and can facilitate communication about it.

But this approach is still not common practice. With a colleague at MIT, I edit the Journal of Seismic Exploration. Unfortunately, my request to turn it into an Open Access journal has met with unwillingness on the part of the publisher. I’m also discussing this approach with the Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Ronald Plasterk. He doesn’t agree with me. I think that’s too narrow a view of quality. Quality means more than the h-index, which is based on publications in traditional journals. In some cases, there are combinations. Take new materials for aircraft, for example. Developing them involves theory and lab work, of course, but also a lot of design and engineering. What will tomorrow’s planes be like? It’s impossible to adopt a position regarding the quality of the solution without assessing the decisions in the design and construction process.

But designers also need to gain prestige, often in competition with researchers who write 'traditional' articles. How does that work?
I’m constantly being told that people don’t publish in Open Access journals because it doesn’t advance their reputation. But engineers or architects don’t get published in journals like Nature or Science anyway, which is all that review committees are interested in. The committees are only interested in the h-index of the journals. So the researcher is just reduced to a number that’s open to debate. It’s a serious problem.

International cooperation is increasing all the time, and research is being done remotely. Researchers can access one another’s laboratories and use the same infrastructure and equipment remotely, for one thing because it’s too expensive for each individual institution to buy them. Publishing in Open Access links up seamlessly with that approach. It’s an ongoing process within which research and reporting alternate with one another. We share interim results, correct them on the basis of the responses received and then continue our work. As a result, we don’t have writer’s block; we push one another. Ultimately, this leads to a result that is convincing, partly because the underlying process is taken into account in the assessment.

How do you assess this? As a comparison: you can assess a football match solely on the basis of the final score. That’s a quick and easy way of producing rankings. But you can also assess the quality of the match itself. In some sports – figure skating, for example – or in ballet, it’s all about the process. That’s not to say that no assessment is possible. For us, in the design disciplines, you often find a combination of process and result. We need to find ways of doing that.

Sooner or later, you need to produce a dissertation. What is that like?
(Silence) I’m afraid that question has rather caught me off guard; I haven’t really thought about it. One relevant issue is of course intellectual property. That’s not as relevant when the design process is a collective one. CERN sometimes produces publications with a thousand authors. But in the case of a dissertation, someone actually needs to personnally produce a piece of work that meets the requirements of his or her university. My views don’t mean that we can forget about responsibilities or the legal position, but I don’t have a cut-and-dry approach.

In the meantime, publishing in traditional journals continues.
We share the responsibility to maintain the level of scientific discourse. We have to select on the basis of quality. That’s the main thing. And the flood of scientific articles is also a matter of major concern. Depending on the discipline, the number of papers in 2020 will increase by 20% to 60%. The whole system of scientific communication looks set to change. We can of course arrange things so that a limited number of people, such as writers and authors, have access to such monuments as Geophysics, Physical Review A and B, Nature etc. but that’s not what we want.

Open Access needs to be constructed so that it works as a quality filter. Open peer review can contribute too. The processes of creating and communicating knowledge need to be integrated and open, so that incorrect arguments or changes can already be refuted at an early stage. That does make you vulnerable. But just what kind of danger does it involve? Things will be dealt with more objectively. Isn’t that precisely the idea? I have seen cases of scientific fraud that came about because top scientists didn’t want to let down a colleague. I have seen second-rate articles being accepted in order not to disappoint the author. The Open Access process that I have in mind will make that a lot more difficult. It will also give young and uninhibited people an understanding of the debate and the quality of that debate.

But isn’t that a real humanities type of approach? The science disciplines have the h index, don’t they?
I’m not saying that we need to get rid of the h-index, but my approach would mean assigning it a different significance. It would no longer be the totally decisive statistic that it is now, but just a figure in a context.

As a Rector, I have also talked to colleagues from the Law department, and have benefited from the high quality of their debates. There too, Open Access would be a blessing so as to make the argumentation transparent. Without counterarguments, positions that are adopted quickly become dogma. A good example of the new approach is offered by Deirdre Curtin, a professor of European law who produces articles that are of very high quality, precisely because they include clear critiques of her approach. The fact that she was awarded the Spinoza Prize is a confirmation of my view of Open Access.

In other words, Open Access to both the article itself and the review is a guarantee of quality, not a threat. And what about the underlying research data?
A lot of major errors have been made in that respect recently. Observations are meant to represent verifiable facts, but some researchers have been unable to accept that their observations were not in line with their ideas. So they altered the data. In physics, you are required to keep a logbook of your observations. That logbook constitutes an essential component of the data, and it also has to be openly accessible. In this way, you increase the reproducibility of your observations. The measurement conditions can also influence the interpretation that you arrive at; being open about those conditions can lead to different conclusions. That is not a threat but an essential enrichment of scientific discourse.

Just as with Open Access to educational materials, not everybody immediately thought along the same lines; here too, concerns about data being lost or misused played a role. To start off, you need to tackle things together with a few 'champions' who do believe in the approach. That gets things moving. And a lot more data is available than can be processed. Not sharing it would be a complete waste. But people still need to have the right to be the first to make use of their observations – that’s where there is a limit to openness. The turning point is when the article is published; the data should then become openly accessible.

It’s like a game, and we’re still trying to learn all the new rules. We now have the subject 'Ethics and Technology' that deals with the rules of scientific communication, including scientific fraud and plagiarism; it also proposes that the most suitable approach to claiming priorities and contributions is Open Access.

How exactly does Delft University of Technology tackle things?
For architecture, we are now trying to find a publisher to set up an Open Access journal that will make the design process transparent and open to discussion. We intend making a cautious start on a limited scale. There are legal aspects involved, for example ownership, but also technical ones, for example design software that not only needs to be available to the designer but for which there is also an open reading module. The most important thing is of course to guarantee the quality of the journal. How do you arrange the review process for an article that is not delivered as a finished product but that is developed publicly over the course of a certain period as a report on the underlying creative process? Reviews then need to be public and themselves become part of the process. They also need to be seen as such. They are no longer a separate and generally invisible process as in the case of a traditional article. In fact the reviewing process only is concluded when the article is finished. The whole publication cycle becomes shorter, which is also quite important.

For traditional articles the university now has a separate fund for Open Access publications. Is it working well?
Yes, we do have such a fund, but the extent to which it’s used is a different matter. There are internal communication difficulties, a problem that I am also aware of at other universities through my membership of the Council of University Vice Chancellors. A university’s board adopts a fine and innovative decision, discusses it with the deans……and that’s the end of it! A lot still needs to be done with regards to raising awareness. The whole discussion needs to be taken “down to the shop floor”. We’re working on it.

I am less enthusiastic about the other type of Open Access, which involves circulating not the published article but an author’s version. I don’t think it’s a good idea to have two different versions of the same article alongside one another. That doesn’t help the transparent advancement of science. Some people say that citations of the author’s version can be included in the accounts for the Web of Science, but I think that’s too complicated. I only want to work with the authorised version, which is the version that should be referred to.

Finally, we impose an obligation to provide Open Access to dissertations; it involves submitting a digital version to the institutional repository. It has led to a significant increase in use of the repository. After some initial discussion, everybody is now happy with the situation.

Interview by Leo Waaijers and Annemiek van der Kuil on 12 November 2009.
Photography by Annemiek van der Kuil.