Any brilliant ideas for stimulating cultural change and encouraging more open science?
Corie Lok
Monday, 13 August 2007 13:32 UTC
Open science was a pretty big topic of conversation at SciFoo. As I wrote on my blog, I think it’s going to take some pretty big cultural changes before open science becomes mainstream. What can individual scientists do to stimulate some of that change? Any ideas?
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IMHO: stop worrying so much (not Corie, scientists in general).
Nobody is saying that we all have to put lab notebooks online and blog about all your breakthroughs before publication.
Start slow. Make small contributions to places like OpenWetWare and Precedings (or keep a blog if you’re keen). Build up contacts, collaborators and comments.
After a year take a step back and decide if it’s worth it.
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Euan is right. Small individual steps tend to be the most effective way for things to happen. Trying to wrench change is always hard and often counterproductive. In the meantime some of us will keep writing about the need to keep science open.
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Ideas and debate in this comment thread at my blog.
There’s a lot more to it than “should I do open science or not”. The fact that the academic research environment and funding agencies are not moving with the times is a source of real concern and even depression for many young, early career researchers.
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Ditto to all comments
Experiment with small projects and don’t overplan. Technology and social behavior change so quickly that it is really not possible to predict how things will play out over time.
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Does anyone think that there’s any merit in creating some “formal” organisation devoted to promoting open science?
At present, it’s a rather loosely-defined term and its few practioners are spread around the web on blogs and wikis. I wonder if something like the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, which promotes open source bioinformatics software, would be an appropriate model for open science?
Or is an umbrella organisation contrary to the way we do things? Should we just rely on social networks and aggregators to bring us together?
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We can encourage people, one at a time, to be more open. Here’s an opportunity: one of our bloggers, Richard Grant, a postdoc, has just posted a question about how much detail he should reveal about his experiments on this blog. Let’s help him out!
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He guys, welcome to the world of capitalism.
It’s not about making small or large steps, it’s just about “what do I gain if I would do that?”. So, I would actually suggest, do make this big step that allows people to get involved by showing them what huge advantages they get in return.
Check for example, Jean-Claude’s OpenScience work… by being open, he get other people to do things for him (run assays, virtual screening, docking, etc…) Big return on investment, I would say.
Also think about the blogs… by being open, bloggers get comments from others, get to learn about new things from other blogs, etc. Again, it is about ROI.
I think all those who are interested in openness from an idealogical point of view will get along by themselves, it’s that big blog of people who do not have time, or do not want to make time, for things which is not advantageous to them, who we need to convince. Creating ROI is they tool then.
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Bite the bullet: Put your name to reviews, even if they’re not positive.
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Egon,
I feel very fortnunate for having found some awesome collaborators. You’re right – as a scientist that is a pretty big payoff for going open. -
I disagree with Paul Wicks. Identifying yourself in bad reviews is a bad social engineerig strategy. Creates unnecessary awkward social situations when you meet your reviewed in a congress, for example…
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