Next Generation Science

Graham Steel (FriendFeed: McDawg) has started a contact list for people who are directly or indirectly affiliated and/or associated with Open Science. He discussed the reason for an Open Science Contact List yesterday on his blog. Although his focus in on the Life Sciences, people from other disciplines are also welcome. If you’re such an individual, add you name to the list.

The Panton Principles for Open Data in Science and the Is It Open Data? web service launched today.

From the Panton Principles preamble:

Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.

For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open.

By open data in science we mean that it is freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. To this end data related to published science should be explicitly placed in the public domain.

The Panton Principles were authored by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock and John Wilbanks at the Panton Arms on Panton Street in Cambridge, UK – with input from the Working Group on Open Data in Science.

You can review and endorse the principles at http://www.pantonprinciples.org

The Is It Open Data? web service allows anyone to make and publicly record an enquiry into the openness of a scientific dataset.

This is an awesome way for us to finish out Open Access week. I’m a bioinformatician and cancer neurobiologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending a talk on Open Science presented by John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital posted a video of the talk here (that guy drinking coffee down in the lower right-hand corner of the screen at the beginning of the video is me). For those of you unwilling or unable to install Microsoft Silverlight, you can view a copy the video below, albeit at lower quality and without slides.

Some interesting quotes from the presentation:

• Companies that are in the business of protecting their business model don’t invest in the sorts of technologies that change the system. (ca. 11:58)
• Value is shifting from control over the copyrighted stuff to the services that they provide to the authors. (ca. 36:53)
• “Open” does not stop with the digital world, so when we think about the way the network has transformed our lives, eBay is a pretty good example of the way the network moves physical things around the physical world by lowering the transaction costs and increasing the transparency. (ca. 37:16)

Wilbanks closed by saying:

So that’s a lot of stuff, there’s the narratives, which carry copyrights, there’s the materials that carry contracts, there’s the data, which we think needs to be in the public domain, and there’s the technology that needs to put it all together, and the whole point of this is that the Digital Commons is essentially a way that we can bring the power of the distributed net that we see and take for granted really in culture and in commerce, and get some of that into science, because the web actually was started for scientific purposes, it was started to share and integrate data but the resistance in the system, the institutional resistance, the legal resistance, the funding resistance, the tenure resistance, the journal resistance held it back and the places where there wasn’t any of that resistance exploded and gave us Wikipedia and gave us Open Source Software, gave us Twitter, gave us Facebook, gave us everything we take for granted on the Web, and so now it’s easier to find shoes, pornography, hotel reviews, than it is to do science on the Web, and so the whole point of this is that by using a Digital Commons we can work within the existing framework to basically rewire the technology and the law and the society in a way that we get some of those benefits, and it takes not just the law but it takes the law, the technology, the content and the community to come together, and so one of the reasons why I spend so much time on the road giving talks like this is I’m trying to build the community because we can make the contracts and we can make the technology and we can liberate the content, but if the users don’t change at some level what they do and how they do it, that’s the ultimate resistance to change in the system, and this is really going back to one of the most famous sociologists of science Robert Merton who talked about science is a little different and this is why it ought to be easier if we can wire it right, which is that there’s almost no value to science until you tell someone about it and what we have to do is get the system set up so that you get rewarded for telling people all the little bits and making it provable and certifiable and rebuildable, because we didn’t get to the position we are because we wanted it to be a controlled system that failed to achieve the potential of a networked science culture, these are just the after effects of an analog world and we’ve got to get rid of that hangover and get back to some of this.

What can each of us do as individual researchers to get involved in Open Science?

• Publish in an open journal.
• Make a copy of your paper available in a closed journal through other means.
• Find an existing open science project inside your institution.
• If you are an alpha geek or programmer, work on the semantic web.
• If you maintain a database, make it available on the web.
• If you have a biobank or collection, publish a catalog on the web.

Science Commons is a groundbreaking initiative that aims to bring the openness and sharing that have made Creative Commons licenses a success in the arts and cultural fields to the world of science. The Open Science framework seeks to overcome many of the “transaction costs” of research and scientific communication (money, time, effort) that hamper learning and collaboration. Science Commons promotes policies and tools to help the scientific community open and allow the re-use of research tools and data, creating incentives for transparent sharing of findings. You can read more about Science Commons at http://sciencecommons.org.

John Wilbanks blogs at Common Knowledge. You can also follow him on Twitter @Wilbanks.

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Why is Open Access important to research?

Social Networks

The FriendFeed Open Access Week room.
The Twitter hashtags #OAweek and #oaw09.

Blogs

Martin Fenner at Gobbledygook: Open Access Week: a researcher’s perspective
Graham Steel at McBlawg: Welcome to Open Access Week 2009, from SPARC
The Daily Scan at GenomeWeb: A Celebration of All Things Open
UML LibInfo: Open Access Week — Oct. 19 – 23, 2009
UML LibInfo: Open Access: Where does it come from, what does it mean?
Dorothea Salo at The Book of Trogol: Open Access Week: Profile of Sarah Shreeves

Publishers

The BioMed Central Blog: Get involved with Open Access Week
The PLoS Blog: Open Access Week
Nature Blog The Great Beyond: Open access: are publishers ‘double dipping’?

Organizations

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC): Open Access Week Begins, First international awareness week for free, immediate, online access to scholarly research draws widespread global participation
The Royal Society Publishing: Open Access Week
The Wellcome Trust: Wellcome Trust calls for greater transparency from journals on open access publishing costs

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In December 2001, the private operating and grantmaking foundation The Open Society Institute held a small meeting of 13 leaders in the open access movement with the purpose of accelerating progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. The result of this meeting was the Budapest Open Access Initiative, a statement of principle, strategy and commitment:

The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Read the entire document: Budapest Open Access Initiative.

With the principle that all research should be freely accessible online immediately after publication, the Open Access movement experienced rapid growth. As of August 2006, over 360 organizations and 4,000 individuals have signed the initiative. Momentum for Open Access is growing. Recent funder mandates have further strengthened the possibilities for Open Access to all research. Indeed, the National Institutes of Health now has an Public Access Policy that makes it mandatory that all funded research be publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.

This week, October 19–23, marks the first international Open Access Week. Open Access Week provides an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. For more, see the Open Access Week website.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is a co-organizer of Open Access Week 2009 and offers this welcome to the global celebrations:

For more on Open Access, see Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview.

Also see Bora Zivkovic’s post on Open Access Week, which includes a video by Walter H. Curioso about his views of Open Access and how it can help in developing countries.

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