Potato Grower

30 POTATO GROWER | MAY 2020 PROPAGATING POTATO KNOWLEDGE Potatoes USA By Ben Harris Research Associate Manager Potatoes USA is funding the decision by APRE to make its repository of information on potato nutrition available for public consumption. Rarely do tales from the Dark Ages shed light on modern trends in health and science, but the (entirely true) legend of the Potato King is a notable exception to this rule. Back when the bubonic plague was sweeping through Europe, potatoes were woefully misunderstood by the general populace. People suspected they were agents of horrific ailments like leprosy, and fear of the tuberous vegetable spread like wildfire. Fueling this paranoia was, as is often the case, a pervasive atmosphere of secrecy and hearsay. Then along came Frederick the Great, ruler of Prussia, who devised an elaborate ruse to trick his royal subjects into embracing the potato. He planted a potato crop and installed sentries to pretend to keep watch over the fields around the clock. In reality, the guards had been instructed to let the townspeople sneak past them and make off with tubers. The monarch's masterful use of reverse psychology enhanced the appeal of potatoes, removed barriers to accessing them, and encouraged their widespread adoption in the nation's agricultural ecosystem. In 1744, Frederick ordered potato seed to be distributed to every corner of his kingdom—another wise move, as scholars have attributed Prussia's ability to ride out the Seven Years' War to its ample stores of spuds. Had rulers like Frederick elected, instead, to wall off potatoes and their wondrous benefits from the wider world, there's no telling how much darker those ages might have been. Today, paywalls have taken the place of castle walls, and the diffusion of data in the cloud has become just as important as the flow of physical commodities across geographic space. Yet the moral of the story remains much the same: Good things come from open access. This is why Potatoes USA is funding the decision by the Alliance for Potato Research & Education (APRE) to make its repository of information on potato nutrition available for public consumption (figuratively and literally speaking) beginning in 2020. Aside from the obvious advantages of open access (OA)—general readers gain an unrestricted view to the full breadth of analysis on potato nutrition, enabling more evidence- based dietary decisions—there are knock-off effects as well. Reproducibility improves under an OA system because researchers can readily read and build upon one another's results, breaking down needless silos and fostering collaboration, constructive feedback and innovation, not only between research institutions but also across academic disciplines. If free-to-read articles in the agricultural sciences receive up to 600 percent more citations than subscription-only pieces, and success in academic scholarship is measured in the number of eyes reached and engaged, it doesn't seem to "pay" much at all to put up a wall. This is particularly true in the era of social media, when keeping an article confined to a single journal amounts to a lost opportunity to capitalize on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other forums that offer significant visibility. As far as the concern that cracking open the enclaves of research will cheapen scholarship by lessening incentives and creating lower-quality standards, the evidence points to the contrary: Heightened transparency—the knowledge that their studies will be in broader circulation— prompts researchers to adhere to greater rigor and documentation in their methods. There are strong signals that the world continues to move away from a guarded publishing model, one that gives far too much credence to the concept of an "ivory tower." In February 2019, the University of California system announced that it would be canceling its $11 million annual subscription to Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of academic journals (with an ownership of around 3,000 journals). Vox, reporting on this development, declared it a gesture that could "herald a revolution in the way science is shared around the world." But perhaps it's not so much a revolution as a return to our roots: the days of the past when, like the Potato King, we freely sowed the seeds of knowledge. APRE and Potatoes USA move to bring research further into public view

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