This factsheet is currently being prepared by the Responsible Science team. It will provide an overview of the topic, explain its relevance to responsible research, and include practical guidance and further resources.
We appreciate your patience as we continue to develop the website.
This factsheet is currently being prepared by the Responsible Science team. It will provide an overview of the topic, explain its relevance to responsible research, and include practical guidance and further resources.
We appreciate your patience as we continue to develop the website.
This factsheet is currently being prepared by the Responsible Science team. It will provide an overview of the topic, explain its relevance to responsible research, and include practical guidance and further resources.
We appreciate your patience as we continue to develop the website.
This factsheet is currently being prepared by the Responsible Science team. It will provide an overview of the topic, explain its relevance to responsible research, and include practical guidance and further resources.
We appreciate your patience as we continue to develop the website.
In some situations, the owner of intellectual property may not wish to restrict access to their property. Open science, open access, and open source are mechanisms for widely distributing intellectual property, with or without associated conditions.
Although often used together, these three terms describe distinct movements with different origins and motivations. Open source emerged from the computing community of the 1980s and 1990s, where programmers championed the freedom to use, study, modify, and share software code. Open access grew largely out of a rights-based legal movement, associated with legal scholars such as Lawrence Lessig, focused on removing price and permission barriers to published knowledge. Open science is broader still, and is primarily concerned with the transparency and reproducibility of research, including the sharing of data, methods, and materials.
Contract law provides the legal mechanism through which open access and open source operate. The intellectual property is provided pursuant to a contractual licence. In exchange for receiving the property free of charge, the receiver agrees to certain conditions. These vary depending on the precise model of openness used, but commonly include restrictions on commercialising any resulting intellectual property.
Open initiatives generally revolve around copyright, which can be used to protect documents, images, data, and computer code. There have been attempts to use patents in a similar way, but the transaction costs of patents are generally prohibitive for open access movements. [1]
‘Copyleft’ is a term referring to agreements which contain a condition requiring that the same terms be preserved in derivative works. These provisions are sometimes also called ‘share-alike’ conditions. This has the effect of making open access conditions propagate through any future works derived from the original work.
Established open licensing agreements are generally customisable. For instance, Creative Commons offers six standard licences, built from combinations of a few simple conditions [2]:
| Licence | Key conditions | Example use by a researcher |
| CC BY | Attribution required. Anyone may copy, adapt, and reuse the work, including commercially. | Publishing a journal article or preprint so that anyone can reuse figures and text with citation. Many research funders require this licence. |
| CC BY-SA | As CC BY, but any adapted work must be released under the same licence (‘share-alike’). | Contributing to a community-maintained resource which requires share-alike, such as Wikipedia. |
| CC BY-NC | Attribution required; commercial use is not permitted. | Sharing a dataset freely with other academics while prohibiting commercial use or adaptations. |
| CC BY-NC-SA | As CC BY-NC, plus the share-alike condition. | Releasing open-source software that is required to stay both open and non-commercial in all future versions. |
| CC BY-ND | Attribution required; the work may be shared but not modified. | Circulating a report or policy submission that should not be altered or excerpted out of context. |
| CC BY-NC-ND | Attribution required; no commercial use and no modifications. The most restrictive option. | Depositing an accepted manuscript in a university repository where the publisher restricts reuse. |
A publisher can also write their own open access contract incorporating whatever terms they desire.
It is worth noting that complete openness is not always appropriate. Indigenous data governance frameworks, for example, emphasise that communities should retain control over data about their people, knowledge, and resources. [3]
Principles of open science, open access, and open source should be considered by researchers and research institutions wherever possible. Open access publishing leads to more citations, advances citizen science initiatives and public engagement with research, and levels the playing field for researchers in developing countries. [4] Similarly, open science and open source initiatives facilitate broader distribution of scientific findings and novel inventions, facilitate collaboration between researchers, and increase the transparency of scientific findings and computer programs.
The choice of licence deserves careful thought. Share-alike (copyleft) conditions are sometimes described as ‘viral’ in the software community: building upon copyleft-licensed code can oblige you to release your own software under the same terms. Conversely, a highly permissive licence may allow commercial companies to profit from a researcher’s work with no return to the researcher or their institution.
Because public disclosure of an invention generally destroys the ability to patent it later, researchers should speak to their institution’s intellectual property or technology transfer office before openly releasing work with commercial potential.
In 2019, Australian researchers at RMIT University published their discovery of a new technique to turn carbon dioxide back into solid carbon. This was published open access in the journal Nature Communications. [5] The first author, Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh, explained that this open publication attracted a broader audience to her research, including school students and other researchers, and helped the team to find an industry partner. [6] Notably, publishing openly did not prevent the researchers from commercialising the work themselves: in 2021, Dr Esrafilzadeh and Professor Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh co-founded a university spin-off company established to commercialise the technology, backed by seed investment and a licence agreement with the university. [7] However, publishing work in a journal open access generally requires researchers to pay a fee, creating disparity between those who can afford to pay to publish open access and those who cannot.
Authorship decisions are not made in a neutral environment. They are shaped by hierarchies, institutional roles, and career expectations. Senior researchers often have greater influence over decisions, while early-career researchers may hesitate to question them.
As a result, inequities in authorship may persist without being openly recognised.
Some contributors are included to increase credibility rather than reflect contribution (honorary authorship). Others are excluded despite significant involvement.
Early-career researchers may accept unfavourable positions to avoid conflict Decisions may be made informally, without open discussion. These dynamics can affect both recognition and accountability.
Authorship order is not a neutral or universally understood system. Clear, explicit discussions are necessary to ensure that it reflects contributions fairly and is understood consistently by all collaborators.
A well-known, historical example of power dynamics shaping scientific credit is the discovery of the DNA double helix. This foundational breakthrough is most commonly associated with James Watson and Francis Crick, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. However, the contributions of English chemist and crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, are often omitted in this story of discovery. Elements of her unpublished work were shared with Watson and Crick without her permission and were crucial evidence for the helical structure of DNA. While her own findings were published alongside theirs, her contribution was not given equivalent prominence at the time. Although historians continue to debate the extent to which Franklin’s data was misused, this case illustrates how power dynamics, access to data, and institutional position can influence both authorship and the allocation of scientific credit.
Engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities is a core component of responsible and ethical science, particularly in interdisciplinary and emerging fields where research intersects with people, systems, data, Country and future societal impacts. It involves building respectful, transparent, and reciprocal relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, recognising them as knowledge holders and rights-holders, with authority over their cultures, knowledge systems, and data, not merely stakeholders. [1]
For example, in the field of quantum biotechnology, engagement is especially important because quantum-enabled technologies introduce new forms of visibility, measurement, and intervention in living systems, often at unprecedented resolution and scale. Ethical engagement ensures that rapidly advancing technological capability is matched with foresight, cultural respect, and shared benefit, supporting innovation that is scientifically robust, socially legitimate, and sustainable.
Engaging respectfully with Indigenous communities is essential and matters because:
Engagement should be proportionate, context – specific and embedded early. Practical steps include:
Work on Jawoyn Country in southern Kakadu National Park demonstrates representative best practice for emerging technologies, where CSIRO researchers co-designed the ethical introduction of advanced sensing tools with Traditional Owners and Indigenous Rangers, embedding Indigenous leadership in field protocols and data governance. [3] [4] This approach provides a practical model for future technologies such as quantum biosensing, where early engagement supports ethical responsibility, trustworthy data interpretation, and socially legitimate innovation. [5]
Duplicate publication ‘refers to the practice of submitting a paper with identical or near-identical content to more than one journal, without alerting the editors or readers to the existence of its earlier published version.’ [1] Duplicate publication, also termed ‘self-plagiarism’, is largely driven by the prevailing academic ‘publish-or-perish’ culture. [2]
Salami publication (also called ‘segmented publication’) is another form of redundant publication where multiple articles are derived from the same study. Although there is no overlap in the text, it is characterised by a similarity in hypothesis, methodology, or results. [3]
The practice of duplicate and salami publications has several negative effects. It may breach international copyright laws and waste publication resources through inefficient use. The redundant publication of original data is also problematic as it may lead to the overweighting of the results of a single study from the double-counting of data. [4] Finally, salami publications are unprofessional and artificially enlarge an author’s scientific work, providing undeserved benefit. [5]
A scientist from Swinburne University had dozens of his papers retracted over concerns about duplication of data. The alleged misconduct was reported by a whistle blower in the same research area who was concerned about the level of duplication, as well as falsification, plagiarism and ghost authorship. The University conducted an internal investigation into this alleged research misconduct, and the scientist lost his job. [9]