Why are some countries the forerunner in Open Science and others not? Why are some researchers familiar with Open Access and other not? The interesting fact is, that it has nothing to do with the countries itself or the individual researcher, instead it is a question of costs. If the costs are low, Open Science is probably and vice versa.
Let us make a timetravel back in the year 2000. Was Open Science possible in that timeperiod? From a technical perspective the answer is yes, but it was very unlikely that some researcher or institution come up with this idea. In that time, a broadband internet connection was very expensive, and the only people who are using it were students. And they are not used the internet for browsing around but they were forced to reduce the time. That means, the normal behavior was, that they checked once per day the e-mails and the total amount they retrieved data was around 10 minutes.
In the year 2000 it was from a technical point of view possible to use an academic search engine. As far as i know, the pubmed database was available in that time. But, it was very expensive to use it. Only for emergency reason and only if someone was really up in the hierarchy he was able to get access. So in reality, 99.9 of all students were not familiar with pubmed.
Now let us compare the situation with some years later. Suppose that internet connection is available even for private users, and suppose that Academic search engines are available. Both will reduce the costs for getting access to scientific information. As a consequence the probability is high, that someone is consuming the information. But even with recent technology, access to scientific knowledge remains expensive. For example, if someone has internet access but doesn't speak English very well his individual costs for retrieving a paper with Google Scholar will remain high. In theory, he can enter the URL in his webbrowser, but in reality he will not doing so because he sees no value.
Bringing Open Science forwards means to reduce the costs for creating, distributing and retrieving information. I want to give a concrete example why the costs for Google Scholar are high until now. On the first look, Google Scholar looks great for researchers. It is an improvement compared to the situation 10 years before. But in reality, there are many problems which resulting into higher costs then necessary. For example, it takes around 6 months until a paper is indexed by the search engine. That means, in theory the researcher has access to all the papers, in reality he doesn't see the current research. A second problem is, that Google Scholar is a one direction lane. That means, it is possible to search for existing knowledge, but an upload button isn't there. Again, from a theoretical point of view it is possible to upload content into the academic Gutenberg galaxis. But the costs for doing so are very high. This reduces the number of people and the amount of content which is uploaded every day. A third problem with Google Scholar is, that nearly 90% of the papers are copyright restricted. That means it is allowed to show them in a pdf viewer, but it is forbidden to download and redistribute the content because of copyright reasons. Or to be more precise. The costs for redistributing exting information are very high. If somebody want's to build his own academic search engine, he needs a lot of money, so Google is the only company right now who is wealthy enough for doing so.
With this facts it is easy to imagine how Open Science will look like in 10 or 20 years. It will be nearly the same situation as today, except that the costs are lower. As a result, more content will be retrieved and more content will be created. The general question is not how to educate a country, an institution or the individual researcher to welcome Open Science, the only question is how to reduce the costs for information. That means, if somebody decides against Open Science it is always an economical problem. It has to do with his ability to pay a given price. If the price is higher then the expected value, than the researcher will decide against Open Science.
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