[sc-announce] A public commitment to open science -- Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Mon Jul 28 13:48:14 EDT 2008


A public commitment to open science

July 28th, 2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/07/28/a-public-commitment-to-open-science/>by
dwentworth

Good design choices are the key to powerful network effects. And when the
goal is accelerating scientific research, there may be no more powerful
design element than institutional policy. By making the right policy
choices, people at institutions can help usher in new norms for knowledge
sharing — where research results are systematically "plugged into" the
network, multiplying the opportunities for discovery.

Boston University's Superfund Basic Research Program
<http://busbrp.org/>(BU SBRP) has embarked on just such an endeavor.
The program, which works to
uncover the effects of improperly managed hazardous waste on reproductive
health, has published its own open science
policy<http://busbrp.org/openscience.html>.
The policy is a declaration of BU SBRP's commitment to sharing research, and
outlines the methods it uses to make the results freely available to anyone
who can use them:

Our SBRP program holds the view that publicly supported scientific knowledge
and tools produced by research programs like ours should be freely available
and accessible. On this web site we have implemented our commitment to open
science in different ways, including using new web-based technologies and
alternative approaches to licensing work that make the vision of shared
research possible. …

The use of open source *wiki software
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki>*encourages communication and
collaboration on research, both externally with
the public and internally within a research group. BU SBRP is developing an
internal wiki for research collaborations.

*RSS <http://busbrp.org/whatisrss.html> *(Really Simple Syndication) allows
subscribers to automatically see the latest products of research, including
new publications, events, and research tools freely accessible through a web
site.

Emerging *permissionless licensing systems* allow researchers to choose the
terms under which they want to share their work; these include Creative
Commons Licenses <http://www.creativecommons.org/> and the General Public
License <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>.

Finally, *open access journals* are those which make content available to
everyone, without requiring a subscription. With the emergence of web-based
publishing, this model can make research more easily available to more
researchers in more locations. A list of open access journals can be found
at DOAJ <http://www.doaj.org/>.

Acknowledging that the outputs of research "come in many forms," the program
uses these tools in many different ways:

Statistical techniques and computer code for modeling environmental
exposures and health outcomes can be licensed through permissionless
systems, written in open source languages and fully commented, and shared
through a wiki. Laboratory methods and synthetic data created to test
different techniques can also be shared, updated, modified by individual
researchers or collaboratively, and discussed through wiki software.
Published articles can be made accessible through Open Access on-line
journals.

In publishing the policy, BU SBRP seeks not only to provide information
about its approach, but also to develop a "compelling model" for other
research programs dedicated to sharing "scientific findings, analytical
tools, data, and research methods."

It's an extremely promising and worthwhile project. Kudos to BU SBRP for
helping to define and propagate new norms for knowledge sharing that can
foster the growth of open science.

................
Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/sc-announce/attachments/20080728/ad4569f6/attachment.htm 


More information about the sc-announce mailing list