The Royal Society's report on open science
royalsociety.org
royalsociety.org
>Scientists need to be more open among themselves and with the public and media
At least in the physical sciences we couldn't be more open. We even have to schmooze 'contacts' in the press to get our results mentioned. We are total publicity whores.
>Greater recognition needs to be given to the value of data gathering, analysis and communication
By whom? I think most experimental scientists are pretty convinced of the value of gathering data!
>Common standards for sharing information are required to make it widely usable
Oh dear, I see another huge government plan for another over complex family of data formats. HDF meets the semantic web. With lots of competing Eu, NATO, International committees all meeting in nice places for years withotu producing anything that is usable
>Publishing data in a reusable form to support findings must be mandatory
Fine but probably pointless. The raw data is available, it's the data processing that is the argument.
>More experts in managing and supporting the use of digital data are required
Cut researchers, hire more "digital media interface facilitators"!
>New software tools need to be developed to analyse the growing amount of data being gathered
We do - we spend most of our time writing < bleep >ing software. The average experimental physicist writes more lines of < bleep >ing code than the average programmer. And thanks to the unique way in which UK academia is funded we did it all with open source software. If we had had decent funding in the 90s we might have used IDL, mathematica, Matlab and tied everything up in proprietry formats - but we didn't so we didn't
NEWS guys - the problem isn't the data - it's the papers. If I want the next job I need publications. they have to be in proper journals to count. The journals not only charge money, they screw us over - you want to buy the Astrophysical Journal at a cost of approx 1 staff member/year? Then you also have to subscribe to the Ecuadorian journal of fish spotting. Want online access, fine, but you still have to pay page charges to publish in it and still pay extra for color 'pages'
If the Royal Society had any purpose - beyond big lunches - it would be to do what it originally did 400 years ago. It should run it's own reputable FREE online journal with proper referees, a citations score where I could publish results and get a job. Without having to do all the staged press releases, minimal publishable unit, getting a story on the news, interesting Discovery channel - and all the other chicanery I had to do!
>>Greater recognition needs to be given to the value of data gathering, analysis and communication
>By whom? I think most experimental scientists are pretty convinced of the value of gathering data!
Yes experimental scientists are convinced - this is why it needs to be recognised - i.e. by hiring committees
>>Publishing data in a reusable form to support findings must be mandatory
>Fine but probably pointless. The raw data is available, it's the data processing that is the argument.
Not pointless. The raw data is commonly available in Astro-Physics maybe - this isn't the case for nearly all other sciences.
I agree though. The bigger challenge is the publishing model in general, which is supremely broken.
In the biological sciences, there is a huge need for more openness. The stakes are just too high for many researchers to share data that hasn't yet been published, and the vast majority of researchers are still deathly afraid of being scooped.
I think there needs to be a better way to write and publish articles in the first place... some way to make it easy to embed different data types (videos, 3d models, 3d graphs, large datasets, code) into papers. Making a replacement for Word (maybe an online, collaborative editor integrated with Mendeley?) would probably be a good step in this direction.
Clearly this is an area which could be capitalized on... and as we're talking about truly novel information the value is almost guaranteed.
In my own experience, from conferences and word-of-mouth, I know the X other labs in the world that are doing the same project as me. If I was involved in pre-publication sharing and one of these X individuals published first, my years of work would no longer be accepted in a top journal and my publication record would suffer.
My dream would be to have a prestigious journal that publishes the reproduction of an entire experiments rather than only novel discoveries. All labs already do this, reproduce published results, but it is rarely published.