Is Open Science Open Enough?

“While it is certainly possible for someone working in isolation to produce empirically tested knowledge that confers practical benefits, it is also fairly obvious that sharing of ideas and observations allows for a greater diversity of hypotheses to consider and a greater range of experience to test them against. Likewise, a greater diversity of perspectives and ingenuity can only result in greater overall practical benefit being derived from any given expression of scientific knowledge... How can Open Science encourage or optimise the benefits of this social aspect of science? ... If we are interested in allowing those from outside the world of professionalized science to realise the greatest overall practical benefit from scientific research, we need to see to it that the choice of research problems and the reporting of results are done in ways that take into account the perspectives of people from outside that world... The short Wikipedia entry on Open Science describes it as ‘the umbrella term of the movement to make scientific research, data and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional. It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open notebook science, and generally making it easier to publish and communicate scientific knowledge’. A few readily-found examples of initiatives branding themselves as Open Science include: the OpenScience Project, ‘dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software’; the Open Science Grid, which ‘advances science through open distributed computing’; and the Open Science Directory, ‘a global search tool for all open access and special programs journal titles’. A blog post at the Open Science Project answers the question “What, exactly, is Open Science?” with: ‘transparency in experimental methodology, observation, and collection of data; Public availability and re-usability of scientific data; Public accessibility and transparency of scientific communication; Using web-based tools to facilitate scientific collaboration”. Open Science Summit, answers the question “What is Open Science?” with “Science in the 21st century using distributed innovation to address humanity’s greatest challenges’. The Open Science Federation aims ‘to improve science communications’ with the participation of ‘open source computer scientists and citizen scientists, science writers, journalists, and educators, and makers of and advocates for Open Data, Open Access, and Open Notebooks’...I have identified the following specific topics each of which seems to have a significant following among Open Science advocates: [1] Open Data ... The Open Data principle attempts to consolidate this into express obligations, first to make all data (including so-called ‘negative’ data from studies or experiments that seemed to lead nowhere) available and, second, to make it available on terms that allow others to reinterpret and re-use it freely... the effective and efficient use of datasets requires standardization of comprehensive metadata and some standardization in formatting of datasets themselves... [2] Open Source ... In fields of science where very large datasets are generated, data analysis may rely on specialist software. Publishing the source code of such software allows the manipulations it carries out to be properly understood by everyone with an interest in knowing, helps the discovery and elimination of coding errors and could accelerate the development of new or improved software to extend and diversify possible analysis... [3] Open Access ... Allowing free access to and distribution of scientific literature helps make the results of research more widely available... for many (most?), the priority remains is to publish in a ‘good’ journal even if that means libraries and individuals will be charged hefty subscription fees... Another possible effect of this ‘professionalist channelling’ of scientific publication into ‘good’ journals that is much less discussed lies in the uniformity of perception of the value of topics to be researched. Researchers gear their research priorities to what will get published in a ‘good’ journal... [4] Open Proposals... In principle, the idea of opening up the drafting of research proposals presents an excellent opportunity for ‘lay’ people to participate in deciding the direction of scientific research. It changes the relationship between publicly-funded professional scientists and ‘society’ from one in which the existence of a class of professionalized scientists is seen as a public good in its own right to one in which the public good stems entirely from the extent to which professional scientists brings their specialist knowledge and expertise to bear on problems selected by the public... [5] Crowdsourcing ... Potentially, then, crowdsourcing could open science up to participation by non-professionals and, by that token, to some extent, direction by non-professionals. However, one has to question how far this could progress before runn