ATO2014: Saving the world: Open source and open science

Marcus Hanwell, another fellow opensource.com moderator, was the last session of the day with his talk about saving the world with open source and open science!

In science there was a strong ethic of ‘trust, but verify’ – and if you couldn’t reproduce the efforts of the scientist then the theory was dismissed. The ‘but verify’ part of that has kind of gone away in recent years. In science the primary measure of whether you were successful or not was to publish – citations to your work are key. Then when you do publish your content is locked down in costly journals instead of available in the public domain. So if you pay large amounts of money you can have access to the article – but not the data necessarily. Data is kept locked up more and more to keep the findings with the published person so that they get all the credit.

Just like in the talk earlier today on what Academia can learn from open source Marcus showed us an article from the 17th century next to an article today – the method of publishing has not changed. Plus these articles are full of academese which is obtuse.

All of this makes it very important to show what’s in the black box. We need to show what’s going on in these experiments at all levels. This includes sharing your steps to run calculations – the source code used to get this info should be written in open source because now the tools used are basically notebooks with no version control system. We have to stop putting scientists on these pedestals and start to hold them accountable.

A great quote that Marcus shared from an Economist article was: “Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself.” Another was “Publishing research without data is simply advertising, not science.” Scientists need to think more about licenses – they give their rights away to journals because they don’t pay enough attention to the licenses that are out there like the creative commons.

What is open? How do we change these behaviors? Open means that everyone has the same access. Certain basic rights are granted to all – the ability to share, modify and use the information. There is a fear out there that sharing our data means that we could prove that we’re wrong or stupid. We need to change this culture. We need more open data (shared in open formats) and using open source software, more open standards and open access.

We need to push boundaries – most of what is published in publicly funded so it should be open and available to all of us! We do need some software to share this data – that’s where we come in and where open source comes in. In the end the lesson is that we need to get scientists to show all their data and not reward academics solely for their citations because this model is rubbish. We need to find a new way to reward scientists though – a more open model.

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