Kiwi foo’s eye view of Open Science

“I just came back from another amazing kiwi foo... And it was as stimulating as ever... Over the past year, I have gone into a rather quiet reflexion of what ‘open science’ is and how to make it work... And the emerging theme of my reflexion was ‘context’.If we want a ‘global’ open science, the formula for adoption needs to be able to adapt to local personal, institutional, social, political, economical and legislative contexts. I may be wrong, but I think many of us who support open science struggle at times with how to make it work in the particular contexts in which we need to operate... I personally wanted to explore what Open Science meant in the New Zealand / Australia context... I think that the local context in NZ/OZ is slightly different than in the Northern hemisphere and there are some things that differentiate this region... For example, you will never see a ‘Research Works Act’ bill here, because we don’t seem to have Open Access mandates. Instead, we have NZGOAL and AUSGOAL which are frameworks for data licencing. The Australians have ANDS and NZ has eResearch, all focused on the data. Tim O’Reilly mentioned the PantonPrinciples  in this context – but the Panton Principles (which I have personally endoresed) cannot be exported ‘as is’ to Australia and New Zealand because neither Creative Commons Aotearoa-New Zealand nor CC-Australia have CC0, for example... New Zealand has a Treaty of Waitangi, and any local open science needs to respect and work constructively to meet our treaty obligations. Lets add to that, that different research groups are going to be subject to obligations related to the international treaties their countries have signed up to. We all have different copyright restrictions and freedoms, we have different systems that determine how to assign funding, and different mandates and guidelines, and are at different points of our careers with different job securities. So, how do we make open science work within these diverse contexts? ... I think we need to continue the global conversation and continue to support each other, but we also need to start working locally in smaller groups to ‘make things happen’...”