Open Science @ “Grenzwertig”

Offene Wissenschaft: Potenziale und Grenzen


Digitale Technologien bringen eine neue Dimension in den Wissensschaffungsprozess. Wissenschaftlerinnen können über Grenzen und Zeitzonen hinweg zusammenarbeiten. Wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse können online zugänglich gemacht werden. Die Grenzen zwischen Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft, und Gesellschaft sind nicht mehr starr.  Aber was passiert wenn Wissenschaft transparent wird? Was sind die Potenziale und wo sind die Grenzen?

New Open Glossary

This is a resource designed to equip people with the terminology that is used within discussions about the general field of open scholarship. Additionally, it possesses numerous external resources that may be of use.

Jon Tennant

Why sharing clinical data should be the expected norm

unfortunately closed access
The Institute of Medicine (IOM), a venerable American institution that seeks to provide authoritative recommendations to decision makers and the public, released a report last month on Sharing Clinical Trial Data.1 The report is a welcome codification of guiding principles and frameworks. It reinforces many arguments for data sharing and urges that stakeholders “should foster a culture in which data sharing is the expected norm.” The IOM joins many other organizations, including drug companies, the European Medicines Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in making clear that study reporting and data sharing in medical research are imperative and the questions ahead are how, not whether.

10 steps you can take to make sure you contribute to a culture shift towards open science.

Introduction to Open Science: Why data versioning and data care practices are key for science and social science.

Carly Strasser has put together a useful guide to embracing open science, pitched largely at graduate students. But the tips shared will be of interest far beyond the completion of a PhD. If time is spent up front thinking about file organization, sample naming schemes, backup plans, and quality control measures, many hours of heartache can be averted.

A Philosophy of Data Science

The epistemological aspect that interests me most, however, is even more fundamental. Given the central role of data in making scientific research into a distinctive, legitimate and non-dogmatic source of knowledge, I view the study of data-intensive science as offering the opportunity to raise foundational questions about the nature of knowledge and knowledge-making activities and interventions. Scientific research is often presented as the most systematic set of efforts in the contemporary world aimed to critically explore and debate what constitutes acceptable and sufficient evidence for any given belief about reality.

An Open Science Peer Review Oath

Open science is a movement that seeks to ensure that the results and the data of scientific research are, and continue to be, available to all. One way in which reproducibility issues can be tackled is through the use of open-science and open-data practices. As attendees of the AllBio: Open Science & Reproducibility Best Practice Workshop, we discussed how the problem of keeping science transparent and reproducible in an increasingly technology-driven, and specialised, domain could be addressed.
One route, at the heart of scientific endeavour, is through the peer-review process.

Springer and Macmillan. A Marriage Made in Heaven?

Holtzbrinck Publishing announces agreement to merge majority of Macmillan Science and Education with Springer Science+Business Media.

This is a strategic transaction by Holtzbrinck and BCP aimed at securing the long-term growth of both businesses. It will create a leading global science and education publishing house with the opportunity to better serve its authors, the research community, academic institutions, learned societies and corporate research departments, as well as to extend its reach within the education and learning markets.

Most participants in “citizen science” projects give up almost immediately

John Timmer summarizes some challenges of citizen science
And while the citizen scientists could clearly save the working scientists some money, the authors suggest that this shouldn't really be the only goal. "Involving the crowd may enable researchers to pursue different kinds of research questions and approaches, rather than simply replacing one type of labor (e.g., graduate students) with another (volunteers)."

There is a scientist in all of us

Louis Liebenberg explains why technology enables everyone to be a scientist.
The implications for community participation in science and conservation are far-reaching. Imagine communities throughout the world gathering data, from remote villages in the Kalahari, the Congo, Australia and Mongolia, to school children in New York’s Central Park, London, Paris, Tokyo, New Delhi and Beijing. Citizens gathering data on birds, animals and plants. Millions of people all over the world sharing their data in the cloud, creating a worldwide network to monitor the global ecosystem in real time.

Opening Science: New publication forms in science

Digital technologies change how scientists access and process information and consequently impact publication forms in science. Even though the core of scientific publications has remained the same, established publication formats, such as the scientific paper or book, are succumbing to the transitions caused by digital technologies. At the same time, new online tools enable new publication forms, such as blogs, microblogs or wikis, to emerge. This article explores the changing and emerging publications forms in science and also reflects upon the changing role of libraries. The transformations of publishing forms are discussed in the context of open science.

Sowing the Seed

Qualitative study that has gathered evidence, examples and opinions on current and future incentives for research data sharing from the researchers’ point of view. Including recommendations for research funders, research institutions, publishers, data centres and repositories and other relevant actors.

Nature makes all articles free (to view)

Interesting move from Nature: All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format. It can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded. Is this open access or public relations? John Wilbanks:
"With access mandates on the march around the world, this appears to be more about getting ahead of the coming reality in scientific publishing. Now that the funders call the tune and the funders want the articles on the web at no charge, these articles are going to be open anyway.”

Opening science: towards an agenda of open science in academia and industry

The article on Open Innovation and Open Science that we initially wrote three years ago and that was available on SSRN is now finally published in the Journal of Technology Transfer. Here is the abstract:
The shift towards open innovation has substantially changed the academic and practical understanding of corporate innovation. While academic studies on open innovation are burgeoning, most research on the topic focuses on the later phases of the innovation process. So far, the impact and implications of the general tendency towards more openness in academic and industrial science at the very front-end of the innovation process have been mostly neglected. Our paper presents a conceptualization of this open science as a new research paradigm. Based on empirical data and current literature, we analyze the phenomenon and propose four perspectives of open science. Furthermore, we outline current trends and propose directions for future developments.