Open Science: Academic inheritance as a barrier to entry

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-04-25

Summary:

"Benjamin Laken, Data Scientist at Vizzuality. Work on projects connected to critical issues concerning society and environmental sustainability. PhD in Geography.

It is said that no man is an island, I struggle to think of a case where this is more true than the world of research. A Scientists job of creating knowledge inherently requires that they build on what went before them. In the case of research, this often means more than inheriting a stack of papers and theory. Young researchers tend to inherit academic code and processing pipelines that were built up over years, sometimes decades by earlier investigators long since gone. They are usually encouraged to adopt archaic practices to participate in adding to those same pipelines by their supervisors. In this post I am going to explore this common pattern, and how people caught in it can begin to move from this state towards the promised land of Open Science. In the world of Software development, there is a core concept, called technical debt. This is essentially the built-up cost of having done things in a sub-optimal way for any period of time, that makes it hard to change later on. The academic version of technical debt is perhaps the worst kind of technical debt to be found and is a significant obstacle to the widespread adoption of Open Science. To explore what I mean by this in more detail, consider the following scenario: You are a biology PhD student. You have spent the past 5 or so years studying cellular biochemistry, and learning experimental and statistical techniques. In terms of computing skills, if you are around average, you may be able to use email clients, word processors and spreadsheets, and maybe even write some Matlab or R scripts. You have accepted an offer to work with a Professor on their project, and on your first day you meet with them and your task is outlined. During their explanation they give you some code and files as a starting point from where you can being your project...."

Link:

https://medium.com/@benlaken/open-science-academic-inheritance-as-a-barrier-to-entry-14cb8755e159

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.obstacles oa.stem oa.open_science oa.students oa.ecr oa.authors oa.software oa.code4oa oa.floss oa.interoperability oa.data

Date tagged:

04/25/2018, 17:28

Date published:

04/25/2018, 13:28