The infrastructures that natural sciences run on are many and varied. A mixed garden of tailormade instruments and laboratories designed to handle highly specific tasks.

This interview is done in personal capacity and based on insights such as recently published in the “International Handbook on Responsible Innovation: A Global Resource”. In 2013, you introduced a vision for Responsible Research and Innovation.

What is the value of social science today? Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan, Photo: Svetluša Surova For me, the value of social science is ultimately about the quality of life. What social science does is that it helps us to take observations of the world and put them into a form where we can understand more about how the world works. We can then use social science to anticipate likely consequences of our actions.

In 1997, SciELO, the biggest Open Access database in Latin America got some initial funding from the S​ão Paulo Research Foundation FAPESP. What triggered the launch of such an infrastructure and what were the main goals back then? Back then a few local scientists approached us with the idea to set up a repository for journals edited in Brazil.

The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) was founded in 1969. How has the significance of DLR as a research infrastructure changed since then? DLR and its research facilities are closely involved in collaborative projects within the national and international scientific communities. DLR has more than 100 large-scale research facilities, some of which are globally unique.

When I started the physics undergraduate program in Rwanda, I wanted to pursue experimental and applied sciences that would involve using research facilities to conduct top-level scientific research for tackling real-life problems. However, there were not always enough equipment and infrastructures available.

Vannevar Bush gave us the most consequential, imaginary conceptualization of a machine for research infrastructure for the 20th century (Memex) and was one of the prime movers in the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) – a superb, if flawed, administrative research infrastructure.  Superb: blue sky research; flawed: in some areas it’s been invaded by people representing particular schools of research and excluding others.

‘Altmetrics,’ and more specifically, ‘social media metrics’ are increasingly deemed valuable indicators to gauge the dissemination and reception of research outputs beyond academic circles, but their potential could be much greater.

In the last 10 years, we have spent a lot of time thinking about the impact of research, both from a research and science management perspective. A few years ago, we also started giving trainings for other researchers on how to approach the blackbox “societal impact”. Our experience is that few researchers really know whether and how their research can have a societal impact.

How can crowdsourcing foster innovations in science? In general, the crowd’s diversity and the sheer number of (potential) contributors have been found to increase the likelihood of finding a novel solution (e.g., Jeppesen & Lakhani, 2010) and the chances of finding the best solution (e.g., Boudreau, Lacetera & Lakhani, 2011) to an innovation-relevant problem.