Going beyond the published article: how Open Access is just a start |

"A published article is only a summary description of the work that was done and also only a summary of the data that was collected. Making the published article open access is important, but is only a start towards opening up the research described by the article. Openness is fundamental to science, because scientific results should be verifiable. For each result, at least one of two possible verification approaches ought to be made viable. One is scrutinizing every step of the research process that yielded the new finding, looking for errors or misleading conclusions. The second approach is to repeat the research. The two approaches are linked, in that both require full disclosure of the research process. The research can only be judged error-free if every step of the research is available to be scrutinized. This information is also what’s needed to repeat the research. I will use the term reproducible research for this high standard of full publication that we should be aspiring to ... Funder mandates and incentives have been pushing researchers towards making their science more reproducible. This, accompanied by cultural change at the grassroots and at the level of journal editors, is making substantial headway. Efforts at each of these levels reinforce each other in a virtuous circle ..."