This post is the second in a series explaining the key findings in Conscience’s 2025-26 study of the synthetic cell research community concerning field-level coordination, open science, and the future of Nucleus. The series is part of a follow-on community engagement process b.next has engaged Conscience to conduct. If you want to learn more about Conscience, the community engagement process, and how you can provide feedback, please read this short introductory post.
Before reading this post, we suggest you read the first in the series. The first post summarizes themes 1-3 in our report about coordination, fragmentation, and collaboration in synthetic cell research.
Open Science: What Researchers Think it Means, Why They Do it, and What Holds Them Back
This post summarizes themes 4-6 in Part 1 of our study, which focused on open science practices, motivations for participation in open science, barriers faced in practicing open science, and the role of patents and patenting practices.
Theme 4 - Awareness, understanding and definition of open science and open source
Awareness and understanding of open science and the practices it entails varied widely among respondents. Some researchers requested a definition to start the interview while others demonstrated a detailed understanding. A common note from respondents is that community leaders— particularly those behind Build-a-Cell — have played an outsized role in defining and normalizing openness.
The most common understanding is similar to that found in many other fields: open science means publishing open access papers and some form of sharing of a subset of the resources that underlie that publication (e.g., data, reagents, protocols). Many respondents mentioned preprints, and sharing relevant resources alongside them, as an important open science practice. Only 2 researchers described themselves as practicing ‘open-source distributed collaboration’, meaning that they openly share resources prior to publication and use those resources as the basis of collaboration.
Many respondents felt that, though the open-source software model is widely referenced to explain open science practices, it is an imperfect analogy for synthetic biology given the cost of materials, patentability of outputs, and regulatory requirements.
Theme 5 - Motivations for participation in Open Science/open source
“It's important to me that we're all building the future together that we want to live in… we would love nothing more than our stuff to go out there and change the world. Get it in somebody's hands, get it changing the world.” - Researcher 0721
Motivations for participating in open science practices split relatively cleanly into three sub-components: moral drivers, field-level practical drivers, and individual-level practical drivers.
A variety of moral drivers were highlighted. The most common response was that academic knowledge belongs to the public. This position is justified because the public paid for producing that knowledge through taxes and/or because biological knowledge and the benefits derived from it should belong to humanity as a whole. This latter position was seen as best served by sharing resources and knowledge to accelerate the field and thereby potential benefits.
Those who talked about field-level practical drivers emphasised that sharing was important to improving the reproducibility and quality of science, as well as establishing shared standards. Additionally, sharing can reduce duplication, in particular when negative results along with detailed protocols and methods are shared.
A subset of respondents highlighted individual-level practical drivers. These respondents believed that sharing - alongside publication or in the ‘open-source’ way described above - can contribute to visibility and stature within the field, increased citations, open new job opportunities, and prompt new collaborations. Some said that sharing made it easier to obtain philanthropic funding and in many cases is compelled by funders. Finally, another subset discussed how sharing early contributes to competitiveness, either by preventing others from gaining priority (not being ‘scooped’) or preventing others from filing relevant patents.
A final important note is that acceptance of open science practices appears to be impacted by demographic factors. Of the five interviewees most accepting of open science, two had 30+ years in the field, two self-described their work as open source, and one worked in government.
Theme 6 - Barriers, caveats and qualifiers for sharing
The factors that may prevent researchers from sharing resources ranged widely.
A major concern was that researchers want to make sure that what they share is meaningful and useful. Researchers won't share, and others won't use, resources unless they are validated and properly annotated. They don’t want to create “too much data that you can't trust.”
Related to this usefulness issue, respondents stated that time, staffing, and infrastructure costs are real and underappreciated barriers, especially for smaller labs. Additionally, even when willing to share there are often legal agreements, like Material Transfer Agreements, that have to be signed and which can take up to a year to execute. One respondent put it concisely: “There's only so much time you have in a day. It is very time consuming to do it well.” When these blockers are combined, a lack of time to make sure resources are meaningful, the desire to only share significant results, and the need to fulfill bureaucratic requirements can significantly dampen sharing.
The ability to protect academic or commercial competitiveness was often brought up as a reason why researchers said they don’t share. From the academic research perspective, this breaks down into two components. First, sharing was viewed as disadvantageous to the extent that it gives an advantage to someone else competing for the same limited pool of grant money. Second, sharing is not incentivized or rewarded within the traditional academic framework, which primarily concentrates on number of papers published and the impact of the publishing journals.
A number of researchers cited commercial competitiveness as a reason not to share. The primary motivation of these researchers did not strongly trend towards a desire for monetary rewards but appeared to primarily track ‘impact’. It was repeatedly expressed that obtaining patents and then using those patents to get commercial traction through licensing is seen as the only path to translation, scale, and impact. One respondent described the situation as:
“So, we IP everything just so we have a path to working in the current, you know, capitalistic infrastructure of scale, which I’m not necessarily happy about that, that’s the way that things are, but then I operate within that system, at least currently” - Researcher 0819
Many respondents explicitly highlighted something that runs through many of the themes discussed so far - fairness and reciprocation. They see a distinct unfairness in sharing resources that others use for academic or commercial advantage without “giving anything back.” Exactly what form this recontribution should take is unclear, though it seemed important that it should map onto the existing academic incentives around funding, reputation and career benefit, citation and attribution, collaborations, and impact.
Conclusion
Drawing from all of the themes above, there are several repeated elements that we want to emphasize here:
- There is no field-level agreement about what “open science” means.
- Researchers are interested in practicing open science for a variety of moral, field-advancing, and individually advantageous reasons.
- The barriers to practicing open science include the desire to only share useful outputs, practical constraints around time and resources, and a conflict between the effort required to make work available for reuse across the field, academic research incentives and traditional IP-based translation.
- Many respondents expressed that their most foundational desire was to produce impact and advance the field.
When we examine all of the conclusions in themes 1-6 in Part 1 of the study, we conclude that there is a strong interest in participating in Nucleus and open science more broadly, but only if participation is structured in such a way that it is fair, easy, incentivized, and contributes to impact.
If the findings in the study and summarized in this post and the first post in this series are to prove useful in structuring Nucleus in the future, it is important that the as broad as possible a cross section of the synthetic cell research community validate our findings or provide nuance to them.
Take the feedback survey Conscience has designed to allow you to contribute to this dialogue. Please note that the form is anonymous to b.next but not to Conscience. This means that Conscience will know the email of those who respond but will not share any identifying information with b.next.