Open Science

Open science is 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. The European-funded project Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research (FOSTER) has developed an open science taxonomy as an attempt to map the open science field.

Open science began in the 17th century with the advent of the academic journal, when the societal demand for access to scientific knowledge reached a point where it became necessary for groups of scientists to share resources with each other so that they could collectively do their work. In modern times there is debate about the extent to which scientific information should be shared. The conflict is between the desire of scientists to have access to shared resources versus the desire of individual entities to profit when other entities partake of their resources. Additionally, the status of open access and resources that are available for its promotion are likely to differ from one field of academic inquiry to another, as OpenScience blog indicates.

Science is broadly understood as collecting, analyzing, publishing, reanalyzing, critiquing, and reusing data. Proponents of open science identify a number of barriers that impede or dissuade the broad dissemination of scientific data. These include financial paywalls of for-profit research publishers, restrictions on usage applied by publishers of data, poor formatting of data or use of proprietary software that makes it difficult to re-purpose, and cultural reluctance to publish data for fears of losing control of how the information is used.

According to the FOSTER taxonomy Open science can often include aspects of Open access, Open data and the open source movement whereby modern science requires software in order to process data and information.Open research computation also addresses the problem of reproducibility of scientific results.

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