Open Science: the key to more scientific integrity? | atmire

"Recent cases of academic misconduct have been a powerful catalyst for Open Access around the globe. In the wake of this trend, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) hosted an evening on open science and scientific integrity. Each of the stellar speakers approached the topic from a very different perspective. Prof. Emeritus André van Steirteghem served as scientific editor at the end of his successful career in reproductive science. Because of his experience serving on the board of the commission on publication ethics (COPE), he was appointed last month as the chair of a new Flemish committee on scientific integrity. Michel Bauwens is a peer to peer activist and did a great job putting open science in the context of other trends in society all pointing in the direction of peer to peer production. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales presented Wikipedia as a case study for open science and scientific integrity ... Bauwens argued that people should become increasingly conscious about the underlying values and principles of those communities and systems in which they participate. He clarified this with examples such as Facebook and Bitcoin, where these underlying principles are not obvious at first glance for many people. These platforms are designed to drive specific behavior. Bauwens shared a variety of observations highlighting the recent explosion of local production communities including FabLabs, urban agriculture and hackerspaces. In this trend, he saw a very different kind of localization compared to the local communities our grand parents used to live in. Even though these new communities act local, the internet enables them to plug in to global sharing of expertise. In these new systems, money is not always the source of power. Bauwens made the abstraction that in these networked communities, the power lies in scarcity. He tried to apply this to Wikipedia where he argued that the power lies with those people who know all the rules for creating and editing articles ... Lots has been said and written about Wikipedia. Nevertheless, Jimmy Wales surprised me with a number of fresh factoids and stories about what goes on under the hood of Wikipedia. He explained how the number of articles on Wikipedia as a whole or in one of its specific language communities has its limits as a measure for success or quality. One illustration was the fact that the Dutch Wikipedia was recently ranked second according to number of articles. When looking closer, it was clear that many of the new Dutch articles were actually "stubs", pages with only the minimal amount of information on a subject. By thinking more clearly about what they wanted to measure, the community started attributing more value to article depth and a range of other metrics. Article depth in particular was an interesting example because to me it seemed like it was based on real observations of what people were doing. This seems like a contrast to some ways in which impact factors are being used, driving behavior that not necessarily aligns with better scientific progress. When looking at different articles, the Wikipedia community judged that the more edits and collaboration happen on an article, the more depth it gains. As a result, this metric can now drive elaboration of pages into good quality articles, as opposed to motivating a flood of new stub articles ... Wales also demonstrated that crafting the vision for your platform can be hard if you want to get straight to the positive definition of a its scope. It was easier in his experience to get actionable policies in place by defining what the system shouldn't be or what types of content it shouldn't host. In the past someone contributed entire copies of Shakespeare's works to Wikipedia. At that time they made it clear that Wikipedia itself is not a repository: as an encyclopedia project it wanted to link out to the original sources but not host those themselves. Repository managers who want to transition from 'the more, the merrier' to different policies may find it easier to think about the typical types of content that they would reject, rather than starting off drafting a comprehensive list of all acceptable types of content.  Wikipedia loves references to peer reviewed journal articles. These articles are being regarded as some of the most reliable sources. This is a big deal, as the reliability of the source can be a deciding factor on whether a certain claim or statement can be included in Wikipedia. As a source, academic papers become easier to verify by a large audience if they are freely available and not locked behind a paywall, hence the enthousiasm for Open Acces