[open-science] Making science more accountable and efficient

Sun Feb 13 06:44:07 UTC 2011

You should check out Victoria Stodden's work on Reproducible Research.

http://www.stanford.edu/~vcs/talks/VictoriaStoddenCommuniaJune2009-2.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/~vcs/papers/ERROLSI03092009.pdf

jtw

On 2/12/2011 11:56 AM, Sören Auer wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I just subscribed to the list, so please forgive me if you discussed a
> similar topic already earlier.
>
> I'm regularly doing reviews for journals and conferences in computer
> science and I notice, that still many papers describe approaches and/or
> systems, but the underlying software and data is not (publicly)
> available. From my point of view this substantially hinders
> reproducability, reusability, and peer-reviewing of scientific results
> and thus efficiency and accountability of science in general.
>
> I know there are the Panton Principles, but I think (although its good
> to have them) they are too strict to be applied in the general case for
> the following reasons:
>
> 1. its not only about data, also algorithms and their implementations in
> terms of software need to be made available
>
> 2. sometimes it is acceptable to have this data, algorithms, software be
> releases publicly, but not under an open license.
>
> I imagine some kind of manifesto, which stresses the importance of
> making scientific artifacts (i.e. data, software, models etc.)
> available, maybe in different gradations similar to the LOD start badges
> [1]. The gradations could be:
>
> 0. The scientific artifacts underlying a scientific publication are not
> made available.
>
> 1. The scientific artifacts underlying a scientific publication are made
> available in a limited way, which do not yet enable complete
> reproducability.
>
> 2. All scientific artifacts underlying a scientific publication are made
> available to the public, they enable complete reproducability but the
> license they are made available under imposes restrictions potentially
> limiting the reuse.
>
> 3. Data is published according to the panton principles and all software
> underlying a scientific publication is made available under an
> open-source compatible license.
>
> Once such a manifesto with these gradations is produced, journals and
> conferences can link to it and require submissions to classify
> themselves according to these criteria (and maybe that precedence will
> be given to more works).
>
> Has someone of you seen something like this already? If not do you think
> the creation of such a manifesto is useful and would you be interested
> to work with me on that?
>
> Have a nice Sunday everybody,
>
> Sören
>
> [1] http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/lod-badges/
>
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