Open research

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A stop-motion video arguing that open research increases collaboration with the general public and their access to the information produced from the research as compared to traditional science

Open research is research that is openly accessible by others. Those who publish research in this way are often concerned with making research more transparent, more collaborative, more wide-reaching, and more efficient. Open research aims to make both research methods and the resulting data freely available, often via the internet, in order to support reproducibility and, potentially, massively distributed research collaboration. In this regard, it is related to both open source software and citizen science.

Contents

Especially for research that is scientific in nature, open research may be referred to as open science. [1] [2] However, the term can also implicate research done in fields as varied as the social sciences, the humanities, mathematics, engineering and medicine.

Types of open projects

Important distinctions exist between different types of open projects.

Projects that provide open data but don't offer open collaboration are referred to as "open access" rather than open research. Providing open data is a necessary but not sufficient condition for open research, because although the data may be used by anyone, there is no requirement for subsequent research to take place openly. For example, though there have been many calls for more open collaborative research in drug discovery [3] and the open deposition of large amounts of data, [4] there are very few active, openly collaborative projects in this area. [5] [6] [7]

Crowdsourcing projects that recruit large numbers of participants to carry out small tasks which are then assembled into a larger project outcome have delivered significant research outcomes, [8] [9] but these projects are distinct from those in which participants are able to influence the overall direction of the research, or in which participants are expected to have creative input into the science behind the project.

Most open research is conducted within existing research groups. Primary research data are posted which can be added to, or interpreted by, anyone who has the necessary expertise and who can therefore join the collaborative effort. Thus the "end product" of the project (which may still be subject to future expansion or modification) arises from many contributions across multiple research groups, rather than the effort of one group or individual. Open research is therefore distinct from open access in that the output of open research is prone to change with time. [10]

Unlike open access, true open research must demonstrate live, online collaboration. Project websites that demonstrate this capability have started to become available. [11] [12]

Issues with copyright are dealt with by using either standard copyright (where applicable), releasing the content into the Public domain or by releasing the content under licenses such as one of the Creative Commons licenses [11] or one of the GNU General Public Licenses [ citation needed ].

Examples

In 2005, several examples arose in the area of the search for new/improved medical treatments of Neglected Diseases. [11] [13] [14] [15] [16]

Science and engineering research to support the creation of open-source appropriate technology for sustainable development has long used open research principles. [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] Open source research for sustainable development is now becoming formalized with open access for literature reviews, research methods, data, results and summaries for laypeople. [22]

Wiki-based examples include: Appropedia, Wikiversity, Citizendium, Scholarpedia.

While first attempts towards opening research were primarily aimed at opening areas such as scientific data, methodologies, software and publications, now increasingly other artifacts of the scientific workflow are also tackled, such as scientific meta-data [23] and funding ideas. [24]

In 2013, open research became more mainstream with web based platforms such as figshare continuing to grow in terms of users and publicly available outputs. [25]

The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Committee met in 2014 to address one key element of the incentive systems: journals' procedures and policies for publication. The committee consisted of disciplinary leaders, journal editors, funding agency representatives, and disciplinary experts largely from the social and behavioral sciences. By developing shared standards for open practices across journals, the committee said it hopes to translate scientific norms and values into concrete actions and change the current incentive structures to drive researchers' behavior toward more openness. [26] The committee said it sought to produce guidelines that (a) focus on the commonalities across disciplines, and that (b) define what aspects of the research process should be made available to the community to evaluate, critique, reuse, and extend. The committee added that the guidelines aim to help improve journal policies in order to help transparency, openness, and reproducibility "become more evident in daily practice and ultimately improve the public trust in science, and science itself." [26]

See also

Related Research Articles

arXiv Online archive of e-preprints

arXiv is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Some publishers also grant permission for authors to archive the peer-reviewed postprint. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008, had hit a million by the end of 2014 and two million by the end of 2021. As of April 2021, the submission rate is about 16,000 articles per month.

<i>Nature</i> (journal) British scientific journal

Nature is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, Nature features peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. Nature was one of the world's most cited scientific journals by the Science Edition of the 2022 Journal Citation Reports, making it one of the world's most-read and most prestigious academic journals. As of 2012, it claimed an online readership of about three million unique readers per month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

Research funding is a term generally covering any funding for scientific research, in the areas of natural science, technology, and social science. Different methods can be used to disburse funding, but the term often connotes funding obtained through a competitive process, in which potential research projects are evaluated and only the most promising receive funding. It is often measured via Gross domestic expenditure on R&D (GERD).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source hardware</span> Hardware from the open-design movement

Open-source hardware consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open-design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) and open-source hardware are created by this open-source culture movement and apply a like concept to a variety of components. It is sometimes, thus, referred to as FOSH. The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned so that others can make it – coupling it closely to the maker movement. Hardware design, in addition to the software that drives the hardware, are all released under free/libre terms. The original sharer gains feedback and potentially improvements on the design from the FOSH community. There is now significant evidence that such sharing can drive a high return on investment for the scientific community.

Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics, specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. The importance of journals can be measured by the average citation rate, the ratio of number of citations to number articles published within a given time period and in a given index, such as the journal impact factor or the citescore. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.

The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) is a public-private-partnership focusing on elucidating the functions and disease relevance of all proteins encoded by the human genome, with an emphasis on those that are relatively understudied. The SGC places all its research output into the public domain without restriction and does not file for patents and continues to promote open science. Two recent publications revisit the case for open science. Founded in 2003, and modelled after the Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Database (dbSNP) Consortium, the SGC is a charitable company whose Members comprise organizations that contribute over $5,4M Euros to the SGC over a five-year period. The Board has one representative from each Member and an independent Chair, who serves one 5-year term. The current Chair is Anke Müller-Fahrnow (Germany), and previous Chairs have been Michael Morgan (U.K.), Wayne Hendrickson (U.S.A.), Markus Gruetter (Switzerland) and Tetsuyuki Maruyama (Japan). The founding and current CEO is Aled Edwards (Canada). The founding Members of the SGC Company were the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Genome Canada, the Ontario Research Fund, GlaxoSmithKline and Wellcome Trust. The current Members comprise Bayer Pharma AG, Bristol Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim, the Eshelman Institute for Innovation, Genentech, Genome Canada, Janssen, Merck KGaA, Pfizer, and Takeda.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laboratory automation</span> Process improvement strategy for routine procedures

Laboratory automation is a multi-disciplinary strategy to research, develop, optimize and capitalize on technologies in the laboratory that enable new and improved processes. Laboratory automation professionals are academic, commercial and government researchers, scientists and engineers who conduct research and develop new technologies to increase productivity, elevate experimental data quality, reduce lab process cycle times, or enable experimentation that otherwise would be impossible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open science</span> Generally available scientific research

Open science is the movement to make scientific research and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessible knowledge that is shared and developed through collaborative networks. It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science, broader dissemination and engagement in science and generally making it easier to publish, access and communicate scientific knowledge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open data</span> Openly accessible data

Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license.

ChemSpider is a freely accessible online database of chemicals owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry. It contains information on more than 100 million molecules from over 270 data sources, each of them receiving a unique identifier called ChemSpider Identifier.

Open-notebook science is the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded. This involves placing the personal, or laboratory, notebook of the researcher online along with all raw and processed data, and any associated material, as this material is generated. The approach may be summed up by the slogan 'no insider information'. It is the logical extreme of transparent approaches to research and explicitly includes the making available of failed, less significant, and otherwise unpublished experiments; so called 'dark data'. The practice of open notebook science, although not the norm in the academic community, has gained significant recent attention in the research and general media as part of a general trend towards more open approaches in research practice and publishing. Open notebook science can therefore be described as part of a wider open science movement that includes the advocacy and adoption of open access publication, open data, crowdsourcing data, and citizen science. It is inspired in part by the success of open-source software and draws on many of its ideas.

The International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) is a non-profit organization, based in Strasbourg, France, that funds basic research in life sciences. The organization implements the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) and is supported by 14 countries and the European Commission. Shigekazu Nagata is the HFSPO President and Chair of the Board of Trustees since 2018.

Open-source appropriate technology (OSAT) is appropriate technology developed through the principles of the open-design movement. Appropriate technology is technology designed with special consideration for the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, and economic aspects of the community it is intended for. Open design is public and licensed to allow it to be used, modified and distributed freely.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joshua Pearce</span> American engineer

Joshua M. Pearce is an academic engineer at Western University known for his work on protocrystallinity, photovoltaic technology, agrivoltaics, open-source-appropriate technology, and open-source hardware including RepRap 3D printers and recyclebots.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Colman</span>

Peter Malcolm Colman is the head of the structural biology division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia.

Metascience is the use of scientific methodology to study science itself. Metascience seeks to increase the quality of scientific research while reducing inefficiency. It is also known as "research on research" and "the science of science", as it uses research methods to study how research is done and find where improvements can be made. Metascience concerns itself with all fields of research and has been described as "a bird's eye view of science". In the words of John Ioannidis, "Science is the best thing that has happened to human beings ... but we can do it better."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open source</span> Practice of freely allowing access and modification of source code

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerardo Turcatti</span> Swiss-Uruguayan chemical biologist and pharmacologist

Gerardo Turcatti is a Swiss-Uruguayan chemist who specialises in chemical biology and drug discovery. He is a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and director of the Biomolecular Screening Facility at the School of Life Sciences there.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew Todd (chemist)</span> British chemist (born 1973)

Matthew Houghton Todd is a British chemist and the Professor and Chair of Drug Discovery of the School of Pharmacy at University College London. He is the founder of Open Source Malaria (OSM) and his research focuses on drug discovery and development for this disease. Recently, he has expanded to other areas, particularly neglected diseases such as tuberculosis and mycetoma in the Open Source Tuberculosis (OSTB) and Open Source Mycetoma (MycetOS) project, through a collaboration with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative and Erasmus MC. In addition, he has some research activity in catalysis and methodology.

References

  1. ↑ For an overview, see "Reinventing Discovery" by Michael Nielsen, Princeton University Press (21 October 2011), ISBN   0-691-14890-2
  2. ↑ Woelfle, Michael; Olliaro, Piero; Todd, Matthew H. (23 September 2011). "Open science is a research accelerator". Nature Chemistry. 3 (10): 745–748. Bibcode:2011NatCh...3..745W. doi: 10.1038/nchem.1149 . PMID   21941234.
  3. ↑ Hopkins, Andrew L.; Witty, Michael J.; Nwaka, Solomon (13 September 2007). "Neglected Diseases Mission possible". Nature. 449 (7159): 166–169. doi: 10.1038/449166a . PMID   17851512. S2CID   4354591.
  4. ↑ Gamo, Francisco-Javier; Sanz, Laura M.; Vidal, Jaume; De Cozar, Cristina; Alvarez, Emilio; Lavandera, Jose-Luis; Vanderwall, Dana E.; Green, Darren V. S.; Kumar, Vinod; Hasan, Samiul; Brown, James R.; Peishoff, Catherine E.; Cardon, Lon R.; Garcia-Bustos, Jose F. (2010). "Thousands of chemical starting points for antimalarial lead identification". Nature. 465 (7296): 305–310. Bibcode:2010Natur.465..305G. doi:10.1038/nature09107. PMID   20485427. S2CID   1143258.
  5. ↑ Open Source Drug Discovery wiki
  6. ↑ Indian Open Source Drug Discovery portal
  7. ↑ Mendeley Group on Open Source Drug Discovery
  8. ↑ Cooper, Seth; Khatib, Firas; Treuille, Adrien; Barbero, Janos; Lee, Jeehyung; Beenen, Michael; Leaver-Fay, Andrew; Baker, David; Popović, Zoran; Players, Foldit (2010). "Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game". Nature. 466 (7307): 756–760. Bibcode:2010Natur.466..756C. doi:10.1038/nature09304. PMC   2956414 . PMID   20686574.
  9. ↑ Land, Kate; Slosar, Anže; Lintott, Chris; Andreescu, Dan; Bamford, Steven; Murray, Phil; Nichol, Robert; Raddick, M. Jordan; Schawinski, Kevin; Szalay, Alex; Thomas, Daniel; Vandenberg, Jan (2008). "Galaxy Zoo: The large-scale spin statistics of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey★". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 388 (4): 1686–1692. arXiv: 0803.3247 . Bibcode:2008MNRAS.388.1686L. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13490.x. S2CID   15266903.
  10. ↑ Todd, Matthew H. (1 January 2007). "Open access and open source in chemistry". Chemistry Central Journal. 1 (1): 3. doi: 10.1186/1752-153X-1-3 . PMC   1975827 . PMID   17939849.
  11. 1 2 3 The Synaptic Leap
  12. ↑ MIAWiki for Open Research and Collaboration
  13. ↑ "Usefulchem". Archived from the original on 22 October 2019. Retrieved 19 May 2008.
  14. ↑ Article in the American Chemical Society's magazine C&E News on Open Research
  15. ↑ Kepler, Thomas B.; Marti-Renom, Marc A.; Maurer, Stephen M.; Rai, Arti K.; Taylor, Ginger; Todd, Matthew H. (1 January 2006). "Open Source Research – the Power of Us". Australian Journal of Chemistry. 59 (5): 291. doi: 10.1071/CH06095 .
  16. ↑ Butler, Declan (4 February 2010). "Open-source science takes on neglected disease". Nature. doi:10.1038/news.2010.50 . Retrieved 16 October 2013.
  17. ↑ Kapczynski, Amy; et al. (2005). "Addressing Global Health Inequities: An Open Licensing Approach for University Innovations". Berkley Technology Law Journal. 20: 1031–1114.
  18. ↑ Maurer, Stephen M.; Rai, Arti; Sali, Andrej (2004). "Finding Cures for Tropical Diseases: Is Open Source an Answer?". PLOS Medicine. 1 (3): 183–186. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0010056 . PMC   539047 . PMID   15630466.
  19. ↑ Pearce, Joshua M. (2012). "The Case for Open Source Appropriate Technology" (PDF). Environment, Development and Sustainability. 14 (3): 425–431. Bibcode:2012EDSus..14..425P. doi: 10.1007/s10668-012-9337-9 .
  20. ↑ A. J. Buitenhuis, I. Zelenika and J. M. Pearce, "Open Design-Based Strategies to Enhance Appropriate Technology Development", Proceedings of the 14th Annual National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance Conference: Open, 25–27 March 2010, pp. 1–12.
  21. ↑ Grue, Amanda J. (2011). An investigation into and recommendations for appropriate technology education (Thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/69511.
  22. ↑ Pearce, Joshua M. (2012). "Open Source Research in Sustainability". Sustainability: The Journal of Record. 5 (4): 238–243. doi:10.1089/sus.2012.9944.
  23. ↑ Main Page – OpenResearch.org
  24. ↑ Auer, S.; Braun-Thürmann, H.: Towards Bottom-Up, Stakeholder-Driven Research Funding – Open Source Funding, Open Peer Review. Archived 24 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine In Peer Review Reviewed: The International Career of a Quality-control Instrument and New Challenges 24–25 April 2008, Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), Berlin.
  25. ↑ Boyd, S: Tools for sharing open research materials Archived 30 June 2015 at the Wayback Machine Gizmodo, 27 December 2013
  26. 1 2 Nosek, B. A.; Alter, G.; Banks, G. C.; Borsboom, D.; Bowman, S. D.; Breckler, S. J.; Buck, S.; Chambers, C. D.; Chin, G.; Christensen, G.; Contestabile, M.; Dafoe, A.; Eich, E.; Freese, J.; Glennerster, R.; Goroff, D.; Green, D. P.; Hesse, B.; Humphreys, M.; Ishiyama, J.; Karlan, D.; Kraut, A.; Lupia, A.; Mabry, P.; Madon, T.; Malhotra, N.; Mayo-Wilson, E.; McNutt, M.; Miguel, E.; et al. (2015). "Promoting an open research culture". Science. 348 (6242): 1422–1425. Bibcode:2015Sci...348.1422N. doi:10.1126/science.aab2374. PMC   4550299 . PMID   26113702.

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