Opening Science
The Evolving Guide on How the Web is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing. Edited bySönke Bartling &
Sascha Friesike.
This is the dynamic version of the book. A printed and SpringerOpen book are also available. The content is Open Access provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC-BY-NC) license. In order to edit this version you need a Github account. All edits will go to the editors before they appear online.
Preface
Basics & Background
Towards Another Scientific Revolution
Sönke Bartling &
Sascha Friesike
In this introductory chapter we establish a common
understanding of what are and what drives current changes in research
and science. The concepts of Science 2.0 and Open Science will be
introduced. As such we provide a short introduction to the history of
science and knowledge dissemination. We explain the origins of our
scientific culture which evolved around publication methods.
Interdependencies of current concepts will be elucidated and it will be
stated that the transition towards Open Science is a complex cultural
change. Reasons as to why the change is slow are discussed and the main
obstacles are identified. Next, we explain the recent changes in
scientific workflows and how these cause changes in the system as a
whole. Furthermore, we provide an overview on the entire book and
explain what can be found in each chapter.
Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought
Benedikt Fecher &
Sascha Friesike
Open Science is an umbrella term encompassing a
multitude of assumptions about the future of knowledge creation and
dissemination. Based on a literature review, this chapter aims at
structuring the overall discourse by proposing five Open Science schools
of thought: The infrastructure school (which is concerned with the technological architecture), the public school
(which is concerned with the accessibility of knowledge creation), the
“measurement school”(which is concerned with alternative impact
measurement), the “democratic school”(which is concerned with access to
knowledge) and the “pragmatic school” (which is concerned with
collaborative research).
Excellence by Nonsense: The Competition for Publications in Modern Science
Mathias Binswanger
In this chapter, Binswanger (a critic of the current
scientific process) explains how artificially staged competitions affect
science and how they result in nonsense. An economist himself,
Binswanger provides examples from his field and shows how impact factors
and publication pressure reduce the quality of scientific publications.
Some might know his work and arguments from his book “Sinnlose
Wettbewerbe”.
Science Caught Flat-footed: How Academia Struggles with Open Science Communication
Alexander Gerber
As high as the potential of Web 2.0 might be, the
European academia, compared to that of the US, mostly reacts hesitantly
at best to these new opportunities. Interestingly enough this scepticism
applies even more to science communication than to scientific practice
itself. The author shows that the supposed technological challenge is
actually a cultural one. Thus possible solutions do not primarily lie in
the tools or in the strategies used to apply them, but in the
adaptation of the systemic frameworks of knowledge-creation and
dissemination as we have practised them for decades, if not centuries.
Permeating an ‘Open Science Communication’ (OSC) under closed paradigms
can only succeed if foremost the embedding frameworks are adapted. This
will include new forms of impact measurement, recognition, and
qualification, and not only obvious solutions from the archaic toolbox
of enlightenment and dissemination. The author also illustrates the
causes, effects, and solutions for this cultural change with empirical
data.
Open Science and the Three Cultures: Expanding Open Science to All Domains of Knowledge Creation
Michelle Sidler
The Open Science movement has been most successful in
transforming disciplines traditionally associated with science. Social
science and humanities disciplines, especially those in the United
States, are less well represented. To include all domains of knowledge,
the Open Science movement must bridge these ‘three cultures’ through
projects that highlight multiple lines of inquiry, research methods, and
publishing practices. The movement should also consider changing its
moniker to Open Knowledge in order to include academic disciplines that
do not self-identify as science.
Tools
(Micro)blogging Science? Notes on Potentials and Constraints of New Forms of Scholarly Communication
Cornelius Puschmann
Academic publishing, as a practice and as a business,
is undergoing the most significant changes in its 350-year history.
Electronic journals and books, both open access and behind digital pay
walls, are increasingly replacing printed publications. In addition to
formal channels of scholarly communication, a wide array of semi-formal
and informal channels such as email, mailing lists, blogs, microblogs,
and social networking sites (SNS) are widely used by scientists to
discuss their research (Borgman 2007, p. 47; Nentwich & König 2012,
p. 50). Scholarly blogs and services such as Twitter and Facebook are
increasingly attracting attention as new channels of science
communication (see Bonetta 2007; Kjellberg 2010; Herwig et al. 2009).
Radically different conceptualizations of scholarly (micro)blogging
exist, with some users regarding them as a forum to educate the public,
while others see them as a possible replacement for traditional
publishing. This chapter will provide examples of blogs and microblogs
as tools for scientific communication for different stakeholders, as
well as discussing their implications for digital scholarship.
Academia Goes Facebook? The Potential of Social Network Sites in the Scholarly Realm
Michael Nentwich &
René König
Social network sites (SNS) have not only become a
fundamental part of the Web, but also increasingly offer novel
communicative and networking possibilities for academia. Following a
short presentation of the typical functions of (science-specific) SNS,
we firstly present the state of knowledge regarding academic usage
practices, both in general purpose SNS and in science-specific SNS.
Secondly, we assess potential impacts by addressing identified key
issues such as privacy, the role of pseudonymity, and the specific form
of informal communication in question. In particular, we focus on the
issue of network effects and the challenge of multiple channels, which
presents itself as a major hurdle for an effective implementation of SNS
in academia. Despite hese difficulties, we come to the conclusion that
SNS are, in principle, functional for scholarly communication and that
they have serious potential within academia.
Reference Management
Martin Fenner,
Kaja Scheliga &
Sönke Bartling
Citations of relevant works are an integral part of all
scholarly papers. Collecting, reading, and integrating these references
into a manuscript is a time-consuming process, and reference managers
have facilitated this process for more than 25 years. In the past 5
years, we have seen the arrival of a large number of new tools with
greatly expanded functionality. Most of the newer reference managers
focus on the collaborative aspects of collecting references and writing
manuscripts. A number of these newer tools are web-based in order to
facilitate this collaboration, and some of them are also available for
mobile devices. Many reference managers now have integrated PDF viewers
(sometimes with annotation tools) for scholarly papers. Reference
managers increasingly have to handle other forms of scholarly content,
from presentation slides to blog posts and web links. Open source
software and open standards play a growing role in reference management.
This chapter gives an overview of important trends in reference
management and describes the most popular tools.
Open Access: A State of the Art
Dagmar Sitek &
Roland Bertelmann
Free access to knowledge is a central module within the
context of Science 2.0. Rapid development within the area of Open
Access underlines this fact and is a pathfinder for Science 2.0,
especially since the October 2003 enactment of the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities”.
Novel Scholarly Journal Concepts
Peter Binfield
Recent years have seen a great deal of experimentation
around the basic concept of the journal. This chapter overviews some of
the more novel or interesting developments in this space, developments
which include new business models; new editorial models, and new ways in
which the traditional functions of the journal can be disaggregated
into separate services.
The Public Knowledge Project: Open Source Tools for Open Access to Scholarly Communication
James MacGregor,
Kevin Stranack &
John Willinsky
This chapter describes how the Public Knowledge
Project, a collective of academics, librarians, and technical genies,
has been, since 1998, building open source software (free) publishing
platforms that create an alternative path to commercial and
subscription-based routes to scholarly communication. It sets out how
its various website platforms, including Open Journal Systems, Open
Conference Systems, and, recently, Open Monograph Press, provide a
guided path through the editorial workflow of submission, review,
editing, publishing and indexing. Thousands of faculty members around
the world are now using the software to publish independent journals on a
peer-reviewed and open access basis, greatly increasing the public and
global contribution of research and scholarship.
Vision
Altmetrics and Other Novel Measures for Scientific Impact
Martin Fenner
Impact assessment is one of the major drivers in
scholarly communication, in particular since the number of available
faculty positions and grants has far exceeded the number of
applications. Peer review still plays a critical role in evaluating
science, but citation-based bibliometric indicators are becoming
increasingly important. This chapter looks at a novel set of indicators
that can complement both citation analysis and peer review. Altmetrics
use indicators gathered in the real-time Social Web to provide immediate
feedback about scholarly works. We describe the most important
altmetrics and provide a critical assessment of their value and
limitations.
Dynamic Publication Formats and Collaborative Authoring
Lambert Heller,
Ronald The &
Sönke Bartling
While Online Publishing has replaced most traditional
printed journals in less than twenty years, today’s Online Publication
Formats are still closely bound to the medium of paper. Collaboration is
mostly hidden from the readership, and ‘final’ versions of papers are
stored in ‘publisher PDF’ files mimicking print. Meanwhile new media
formats originating from the web itself bring us new modes of
transparent collaboration, feedback, continued refinement, and
reusability of (scholarly) works: Wikis, Blogs and Code Repositories, to
name a few. This chapter characterizes the potentials of Dynamic
Publication Formats and analyzes necessary prerequisites. Selected tools
specific to the aims, stages, and functions of Scholarly Publishing are
presented. Furthermore, this chapter points out early examples of usage
and further development from the field. In doing so, Dynamic
Publication Formats are described as a) a ‘parallel universe’ based on
the commodification of (scholarly) media, and b) as a much needed
complement, slowly recognized and incrementally integrated into more
efficient and dynamic workflows of production, improvement, and
dissemination of scholarly knowledge in general.
Open Research Data: From Vision to Practice
Heinz Pampel &
Suenje Dallmeier-Tiessen
“To make progress in science, we need to be open and
share.” This quote from Neelie Kroes (2012), vice president of the
European Commission describes the growing public demand for an Open
Science. Part of Open Science is, next to Open Access to peer-reviewed
publications, the Open Access to research data, the basis of scholarly
knowledge. The opportunities and challenges of Data Sharing are
discussed widely in the scholarly sector. The cultures of Data Sharing
differ within the scholarly disciplines. Well advanced are for example
disciplines like biomedicine and earth sciences. Today, more and more
funding agencies require a proper Research Data Management and the
possibility of data re-use. Many researchers often see the potential of
Data Sharing, but they act cautiously. This situation shows a clear
ambivalence between the demand for Data Sharing and the current practice
of Data Sharing. Starting from a baseline study on current discussions,
practices and developments the article describe the challenges of Open
Research Data. The authors briefly discuss the barriers and drivers to
Data Sharing. Furthermore, the article analyses strategies and
approaches to promote and implement Data Sharing. This comprises an
analysis of the current landscape of data repositories, enhanced
publications and data papers. In this context the authors also shed
light on incentive mechanisms, data citation practises and the
interaction between data repositories and journals. In the conclusions
the authors outline requirements of a future Data Sharing culture.
Intellectual Property and Computational Science
Victoria Stodden
This chapters outlines some of the principles ways
United States Intellectual Property Law affects the sharing of digital
scholarly objects, particularly for those who wish to practice
reproducible computational science or open science. The sharing of the
research manuscript, and the data and code that are associated with the
manuscript, can be subject to copyright and software is potentially
subject to patenting. Both of these aspects of Intellectual Property
must be confronted by researchers and this is discussed for each of the
three digital scholarly objects: the research article; the data; and the
code. Recommendations are made to maximize the downstream reuse utility
of each of these objects. Finally, this chapter proposes new structures
to manage Intellectual Property rights related to scientific research
going forward.
Research Funding in Open Science
Jörg Eisfeld-Reschke,
Ulrich Herb &
Karsten Wenzlaff
The advent of the Open Science paradigm has led to new
interdependencies between the funding of research and the practice of
Open Science. On the one hand, traditional revenue models in Science
Publishing are questioned by Open Science Methods and new revenue models
in and around Open Science need to be established. This only works if
researchers make large parts of their data and results available under
Open Access principles. If research funding wants to have an impact
within this new paradigm, it requires scientists and scientific projects
to make more than just text publications available according to the
Open Access principles. On the other hand, it is still to be discussed
how Research Funding itself could be more open. Is it possible to
generate a new understanding of financing science shaped by
transparency, interaction, participation, and stakeholder governance—in
other words reach the next level as Research Funding 2.0? This article
focuses on both of the aspects: Firstly, how Research Funding is
promoting Open Science. Secondly, how an innovative and open Research
Funding might look like.
Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing in the Sciences
Thomas Schildhauer &
Hilger Voss
The advent of open innovation has intensified
communication and interaction between scientists and corporations.
Crowdsourcing added to this trend. Nowadays research questions can be
raised and answered from virtually anywhere on the globe. This chapter
provides an overview of the advancements in open innovation and the
phenomenon of crowdsourcing as its main tool for accelerating the
solution-finding process for a given (not only scientific) problem by
incorporating external knowledge, and specifically by including
scientists and researchers in the formerly closed but now open systems
of innovation processes. We present perspectives on two routes to open
innovation and crowdsourcing: either asking for help to find a solution
to a scientific question or contributing not only scientific knowledge
but also other ideas towards the solution-finding process. Besides
explaining forms and platforms for crowdsourcing in the sciences we also
point out inherent risks and provide a future outlook for this aspect
of (scientific) collaboration.
The Social Factor of Open Science
Tobias Fries
Increasing visibility in the internet is a key success
factor for all stakeholders in the online world. Sky rocketing online
marketing spending of companies as well as increasing personal resources
in systematic “self-marketing” of private people are a consequence of
this. Similar holds true for the science and knowledge creation world -
here, visibility is also a key success factor and we are currently
witnessing the systematic exploitation of online marketing channels by
scientists and research insitutes. A theorectical base for this novel
interest in science marketing is herein provided by transfering concepts
from the non-science online marketing world to the special situation of
science marketing. The article gives hints towards most promising,
practical approaches. The theorectical base is derived from
considerations in the field of scale-free networks in which quality is
not necessarily a predominant success factor, but the connectivity.
Cases, Recipes & Howtos
Challenges of Open Data in Medical Research
Ralf Floca
The success of modern, evidence based and personalized
medical research is highly dependent on the availability of a sufficient
data basis in terms of quantity and quality. This often also implies
topics like exchange and consolidation of data. In the area of conflict
between data privacy, institutional structures and research interests,
several technical, organizational and legal challenges emerge. Coping
with these challenges is one of the main tasks of information management
in medical research. Using the example of cancer research, this case
study points out the marginal conditions, requirements and peculiarities
of handling research data in the context of medical research.
How this book was created using collaborative authoring and cloud tools
Sönke Bartling
This book about novel publishing and collaboration
methods of scholarly knowledge was itself created using novel and
collaborative authoring tools. Google Docs as a collaborative authoring
and text editing tool and Dropbox as a cloud storage solution were used.
Our experience was a positive one and we think that it saved us a lot
of organisational emails and hundreds of work hours. Here we describe
the workflow process in detail so that the interested author might
benefit from what we learnt.
Making data citeable: DataCite
Jan Brase
In 2005 the German National Library of Science and
Technology started assigning DOI names to datasets to allow stabile
linking between articles and data. In 2009 this work lead to the funding
of DataCite, a global consortium of libraries and information
institutions with the aim to enable scientists to use datasets as
independently published records that can be shared, referenced and
cited.
Opening Science
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