Open season in science

The change in scientific culture towards openness is a recognition that the public are interested in research and discerning in their support of it. Science thrives when supported by the public; allowing the public and researchers to access work produced by Sanger Institute will help its researchers continue to provide the best science that is most beneficial to society.

Sarion Bowers

The Great Potential of Citizen Science

Citizen science is nothing new, but what makes internet-enabled citizen science different, is the sheer scale of amateur involvement. Benedikt Fecher sees great potential for citizen science, but argues a return to smaller-scale, high-involvement projects would be beneficial. This alternative model depends on citizen analysis, rather than just data collection. The core challenges for this kind of citizen science is to motivate and enable expert volunteers to make a long-term commitment to a scientific problem.

The Open Science Interviews

Interview with David Berry
I think it is interesting to go through the medium of paper to think about the digital
Interview with Jon Crowcroft
It is a completely standard social phenomena, and if your work is visible and you get on with people, you get more people to work with and you get, you know, the Paul Erdos factor.
Interview with Carolina Ödman-Govender
To me open science is sharing much more than just data and the code, it is also sharing thinking.
Interview with Cristobal Cobo
so we live with this monster that has two heads, one is the traditional way and the other way is how people would like to do the things.
Interview mit Christian Heise
und offen meine ich in dem Fall wirklich komplett offen.
Interview mit Daniel Mietchen
der gesamte Wissenschaftsprozess ist einfach nur sehr schlaglichtartig beleuchtet bisher in der Art wie wir Wissenschaft publizieren, und ich will einfach den ganzen Prozess publik machen.
Interview mit PA
Also ich glaube in der Wissenschaft gibt es eine lange Tradition von Offenheit, weil es geht ja oft um die Transparenz was gemacht wurde
  Interview mit IB
Technik vielleicht als Voraussetzung, aber noch lange nicht ausreichend um wirklich Open Science irgendwie betreiben zu können.
     

Putting open science into practice: A social dilemma?

Digital technologies carry the promise of transforming science and opening up the research process. We interviewed researchers from a variety of backgrounds about their attitudes towards and experiences with openness in their research practices. We observe a considerable discrepancy between the concept of open science and scholarly reality. While many researchers support open science in theory, the individual researcher is confronted with various difficulties when putting open science into practice. We analyse the major obstacles to open science and group them into two main categories: individual obstacles and systemic obstacles. We argue that the phenomenon of open science can be seen through the prism of a social dilemma: what is in the collective best interest of the scientific community is not necessarily in the best interest of the individual scientist. We discuss the possibilities of transferring theoretical solutions to social dilemma problems to the realm of open science.


First Monday. Kaja Scheliga, Sascha Friesike.

The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Paul Royster is proud of what he has achieved with his institutional repository. Currently, it contains 73,000 full-text items, of which more than 60,000 are freely accessible to the world. This, says Royster, makes it the second largest institutional repository in the US, and it receives around 500,000 downloads per month, with around 30% of those going to international users. Unsurprisingly, Royster always assumed that he was in the vanguard of the OA movement, and that fellow OA advocates attached considerable value to the work he was doing. All this changed in 2012, when...
Open and Shut?.

Science’s Big Data Problem

Modern science seems to have data coming out of its ears. From genome sequencing machines capable of reading a human’s chromosomal DNA (about 1.5 gigabytes of data) in half an hour to particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (which generates close to 100 terabytes of data a day), researchers are awash with information. Yet in this age of big data, science has a big problem: it is not doing nearly enough to encourage and enable the sharing, analysis and interpretation of the vast swatches of data that researchers are collecting.


Timo Hannay. Wired.

Path Dependence and Academic Publishing

Publishing in academia still bears the imprints of the book age.
Just as in the story of the QWERTY keyboard, a system of academic publishing prevailed that works, but is suboptimal. The established system of academic publishing, from submission, review, and publication is in the eye of the socio-technological opportunities outdated. It takes too much time, it is too expensive and leads to an artificial scarcity of content. It no longer reflects the zeitgeist.

When data sharing gets close to 100%: what ancient human DNA studies can teach the Open Science movement

This study analyzes rates and ways of data sharing regarding mitochondrial, Y chromosomal and autosomal polymorphisms in a total of 162 papers on human ancient DNA published between 1988 and 2013. [...] Our study highlights three important aspects. First, we provide evidence that researchers motivations are as necessary as stakeholders policies and norms to achieve very high sharing rates. Second, careful analyses of the ways in which data are made available are an important first step to maximize data findability, accessibility, useability and preservation. Third and finally, the case of human ancient DNA studies demonstrates how Open Science can foster scientific advancements, showing that openness and transparency can help build rigorous and reliable scientific practices even in the presence of complex experimental challenges.