open science

I just posted the below as a comment on a blog, but it was good so I thought
I'd repost here

What is open science and what is the system? Well I am sure that there are
many viewpoints on this, so I am going to just put forward one here.

At a fundamental level 'the system' is how we ascribe credit to
participation in science. The credit is converted to grant money, the
dollars keep the food on the plate. The decision makers for the grants
generally lie at national funding level. These people are busy and have a
lot of applications to process, but that is not to say that they are
disinterested in the state of the scientific funding ecosystem. However as
long as there are too many decisions and not enough time then metrics such
as a measure based on journal related factors will dominate. If it is easy
to measure and to see how credit can be assigned for contributions that lie
outside the traditional publication at the end of the research cycle then I
am confident that such criteria will be taken into account, but it is very
early days at the moment and I don't think we can expect to see an overnight
rapid transition, especially when the tools for measuring such contributions
are in their infancy.

What is open science, and why might it be important to funding agencies to
see it being utilized? Again, just one viewpoint. Well, there is a lot of
data out there, and I expect that a lot of good science could be done on
second hand data. This is already common in Astronomy. This should help to
utilize efficiencies of scale. In addition with better information about
what is happening, and more eyeballs working together, the amount of
redundant work can hopefully be minimized. As the open source adage goes,
with many eyeballs all bugs are shallow.

There are also a lot of published papers out there, and the scaling time for
an individual to get to the data resource that they need is only going to
get longer when there is more information to process. I recall hearing that
in 2005 something along the lines of 600,000 people graduated in China with
a degree in engineering. If you talk to any academic journal editor most of
them will tell you that the rate of submission of papers from the pool of
Chinese scientists is growing year on year.

I see a function of open science as being a way to help the flow of
information in an open system that maximizes the efficiency for the right
piece of information to get to the right person, whether that be a piece of
data for analysis, a protocol for an experiment or a contact for a
collaboration.

We have a prerogative to make this happen as a consequence of excess of
information that we are faced with.

There is however the very important need to be able to credit people who
participate in an open way. As someone working for an academic publisher I
feel that part of my job to help create systems that can help to more
accurately measure broader contributions to the scientific enterprise. As I
said earlier, these systems are in their infancy, but it is a very exciting
time to be involved with this.

tags: science, science2.0, open science