A challenge to incentivize open science - BMC series blog

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-17

Summary:

"We’ve all been there. A new and exciting paper comes across our screen, and as we read through it, we get excited about all sorts of possibilities. Perhaps the paper describes an exciting dataset that we could bring to bear on our own work, or maybe the paper describes a new method that we’ve been hoping to use. It might be something simpler, like a really amazing figure that we’d like to reproduce with our own data. But this excitement doesn’t last long when you realize that the authors have not made their data or the code they used for analysis and visualization publicly available. At this point you might consider emailing the authors, but that route may not be fruitful as others have discovered (Wolkovich et al, 2012). Sound familiar? You’re not alone. A great many of us are also frustrated by the lack of data and code accompanying published papers. Access to such artifacts makes it possible for others to validate your findings, replicate the results, and build novel ideas upon this body of work. Sharing your data can also lead to more citations (Piwowar et al, 2007) and increased opportunities for collaborations. These are the reasons why a handful of ecologists got together to begin rOpenSci – a collective aimed at making it easier to access existing ecological and environmental data through open source software. By showcasing opportunities and possibilities that already exist with the limited data that’s out there, we hope to encourage more scientists to share their data and support organizations and agencies that make such resources available. In an effort to encourage more ecologists to take advantage of existing datasets and share their own, we have recently launched an Open Science Challenge. You propose a research project (or enhance an existing effort) involving one or more of our R packages, and our team will provide you with all the support you’ll need to complete and publish the work..."

Link:

http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcseriesblog/2013/01/16/a-challenge-to-incentivize-open-science/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.biology oa.new oa.data oa.open_science oa.impact oa.reproducibility oa.floss oa.environment oa.citations oa.ecology oa.altmetrics oa.gbif oa.impactstory oa.ropensci oa.metrics oa.announcements

Date tagged:

01/17/2013, 10:40

Date published:

01/17/2013, 05:40