Open your minds and share your results : Nature News & Comment

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-06-27

Summary:

“... the open-access debate has drawn attention away from a deeper issue that is at the heart of the scientific process: that of 'open data'. In an attempt to focus much-needed attention on this subject, I chaired a group that produced Science as an Open Enterprise, a policy report from the Royal Society in London, published last week... Publication of scientific theories — and the supporting experimental and observational data — permits others to identify errors, to reject or refine theories and to reuse data. Science's capacity for self-correction comes from this openness to scrutiny and challenge. Modern techniques to gather, store and manipulate data make this more difficult. In the 1980s, I published a paper that presented seven hard-won data points showing the relationship between stress and velocity beneath a glacier. Two years ago, I was involved in an analogous experiment on the Antarctic ice sheet that created more than a billion times more data points. No journal could publish these data, so for them to be accessible, the only option was to deposit the information in a recognized repository, complete with metadata (data about data), and to signpost it in published papers, preferably through live links in the papers' electronic versions. In the Royal Society report, we argue that this procedure must become the norm, required by journals and accepted by the scientific community as mandatory. As scientists, we have some way to go to achieve this. A recent study of the 50 highest-impact journals in biomedicine showed that only 22 required specific raw data to be made available as a condition of publication. Only 40% of papers fully adhered to the policy and only 9% had deposited the full raw data online (A. A. Alsheikh-Ali et al. PLoS ONE 6, e24357; 2011). We also need to be open towards fellow citizens. The massive impact of science on our collective and individual lives has decreased the willingness of many to accept the pronouncements of scientists unless they can verify the strength of the underlying evidence for themselves... True openness requires data to be not only accessible, but also intelligible, assessable (who produced the data, what are their qualifications, do they have conflicts of interest?) and reusable... Too often, we scientists seek patterns in data that reflect our preconceived ideas. And when we do publish the data, we too frequently publish only those that support these ideas. This cherry-picking is bad practice and should stop. For example, there is strong evidence that the partial reporting of the results of clinical trials, skewed towards those with positive outcomes, obscures relationships between cause and effect. We should publish all the data, and we should explore them not just for preconceived relationships, but also for unexpected ones. Without rigorous use and manipulation of data, science merely creates myths. At the same time, communications technologies are displacing the printed page from its dominant role as the medium of scientific communication. This is already exploiting the collective intelligence of the scientific community and shifting the social dynamic of research towards collaboration. This shift has not been mandated by research councils, governments or national academies, but is the consequence of scientists finding more productive and creative ways to do science. Pathfinder disciplines include bioinformatics, astronomy, mathematics, nanotechnology and social and health statistics. What about costs? Data curation should be viewed as a necessary cost of research. Creative data generation should be a source of scholarly esteem and a criterion for promotion. We need a revolution in the role of the science library, with data scientists supporting the management of data strategies for both institutions and researchers. We need strategic funding to develop software tools to automate and simplify the creation and exploitation of data sets. And above all, we need scientists to accept that publicly funded research is a public resource.”

Link:

http://www.nature.com/news/open-your-minds-and-share-your-results-1.10895

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.policies oa.comment oa.green oa.libraries oa.open_science oa.metadata oa.uk oa.impact oa.costs oa.librarians oa.reports oa.funders oa.lay oa.repositories.data oa.compliance oa.studies oa.data.curation oa.royal_society oa.repositories

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

06/27/2012, 20:58

Date published:

06/27/2012, 21:14