Open Science: An Academic Librarian’s Perspective – Open @ CUNY

"Open Science is a multifaceted notion encompassing open access to publications, open research data, open source software, open collaboration, open peer review, open notebooks, open educational resources, open monographs, citizen science, or research crowdfunding in order to remove barriers in the sharing of scientific research output and raw data (FOSTER). In other words, the goal of the Open Science movement is to make scientific data a public good in contrast to the expansion of intellectual property rights over knowledge propagated by the paywalled dissemination model. Therefore, Open Science is more of a social and cultural phenomenon aiming to recover the founding principles of scientific research rather than an alternative form of knowledge exchange. It is important to emphasize that despite the fact that Open Science is currently most visible in the area of “hard sciences” (due to large data sets generated by high-throughput experiments and simulations), it is not limited to only the STEM fields — it is also applicable to other types of scientific research....

In order to support open data-driven research, academic librarians have to expand traditional library services and adopt new data-related roles, which will require expanding their qualifications beyond library science and subject degrees toward information technologies, data science, data curation, and e-science. This will lead to a deep transformation in librarians themselves...."