Open Science: digging deeper into the assumptions that underpin openness and Web 2.0 | Impact of Social Sciences

"For the purpose of an empirical study on open science, we conducted an in-depth literature analysis on the topic. After reading and analyzing about 50 peer-reviewed papers and a selected sample of blog entries and monographs (a list of the literature can be found here), we came to the, maybe unsurprising, conclusion that open science is an umbrella term that encompasses a multitude of different assumptions about the future of knowledge creation and dissemination; an umbrella term however that comprises five more or less distinct schools of thought with different assumptions about what exact aspect of research should be ‘open’ and ‘open’ to whom (see table 1). In the present article we will focus on one of these five schools, the ‘public school’ and draw on perspectives of openness in research for scholarly communication to a wider non-expert audience. The underlying paper for this article—including descriptions of all five schools—can be found here."