HPCwire: Gateways for Open Science

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-08-13

Summary:

“'Science is really ripe for disruption. A lot of the practices are still very much rooted in their analog beginnings.' That is how Kaitlin Thaney, Director of the Mozilla Science Lab—a new open science initiative focused on innovation, best practice, and skills training for research—began her plenary talk at XSEDE13 in San Diego last month.  Thaney believes that the web has fundamentally transformed how we interrogate, how we interact with content, how we discover information, our work environments, and our agility. 'We at Mozilla are focusing on how we can help researchers use the power of the open web to change science’s future,' she said.  The Mozilla Science Lab is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a leading funder in digital scholarship and information technology with projects focused on data sharing, new forms of metrics for scholarly research, and other technologies on the library side. Thaney sees this as a larger play to see how all of them can work together toward a broader means of coordinating these various efforts to provide infrastructure and also leadership in the open science space while pushing this practice into the mainstream.   Thaney makes the case that our current systems are still designed to create friction despite their original intentions. 'Modern discoveries are still locked up in various silos and not as interlinked as they could be,' she said. 'Even looking at the way we reward scientific contribution, it is still very much reliant on a paper-based system. We are starting to see what the behavioral effects will be from this sort of reward system, and what we are seeing is more error creep into the way research is done.'  Citing Elizabeth Iorns, Co-founder of Science Exchange, Thaney said that 'up to 70 percent of research from academic labs cannot be reproduced, representing an enormous waste of money and effort.' She pointed to this statistic as reflective of a larger problem that the research community should address by developing a better way to reflect and reward research contributions and practices. 'It is really keeping us from that whole notion of building on additional knowledge, or prior knowledge, or standing on the shoulders of giants, and really looking at how we can start to minimize not only the amount of error but also the amount of duplication,' said Thaney ..."

Link:

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2013-08-12/gateways_for_open_science.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.open_science oa.events oa.presentations oa.funders oa.reproducibility oa.sloan_foundation oa.mozilla oa.mozilla_science_lab

Date tagged:

08/13/2013, 16:00

Date published:

08/13/2013, 12:00