[open-science] New participants, Open Science Kentucky

Sun Oct 30 14:06:03 UTC 2011

Hi Adam

Thanks for the interest and glad you're here. Expect some robust debate but also the good insights that comes out of it. I wanted to speak specifically to your point about a lack of a good site to find things online.

Building on some ideas of Heather Piwowar's I've been knocking around some ideas on what we might do about this. It seems that we need three things. A site that pulls together and/or indexes all the best content on open research from around the web as well as aims to organise it so that people can find what they're looking for. A means of getting that content indexed so that it appears when people aren't looking for it but perhaps should be (i.e. PubMed, WoK etc etc). And finally a way to motivate people to take the ideas that aren't quite yet formed, or aren't quite yet as well laid out as they could be, and turn them into well finished pieces.

The answer to this for me is something that is a website that looks from one angle like a journal (contains peer reviewed content with DOIs, the whole deal) but that would also bring more general material in from the wider web, like a community aggregation website. There is a model for this in PLoS Hubs but that doesn't provide the whole answer (indexing etc).

We've got some ideas on how to do this and possible angles on how to make it happen but I'm wondering whether people feel that this would be a good step. The bottom line is it would be quite a lot of work, both to get it off the ground, but also to sustain it so it would need strong support to be viable.

Cheers

Cameron

On 27 Oct 2011, at 23:20, Adam Robison wrote:

> Hi, everyone,
> 
> My name is Andrew Ramsey. I'm writing on behalf of Open Science Kentucky (OSK), a relatively new organization dedicated to establishing greater participation in open science among researchers and the public. Thanks for having us here.
> 
> OSK started as collective disillusionment among medical students at the University of Louisville School of Medicine who felt that the evidence-based practices we were learning merely shifted our curriculum from one flawed paradigm to another. Bad, opaque, interest-driven science continues to be the predominant information medium, despite the shift to practice-by-numbers medicine. Now, however, we physicians more complacently practice, weilding bad science unquestioningly because we can remind ourselves we are under the aegis of evidence. Unfortunately, in medicine, our careless application of evidence-based principles kills people.
> 
> We have enjoyed reading web commentary from thought leaders in the open science movement, many of whom are participants on this message board. We defer to you for your remarkable insight! However, we noted that finding resources related to open science was remarkably difficult when searching directly for it. It is thus very unlikely the average scientist will realize an open science epiphany while looking for other things. 
> 
> To shift the paradigm to open science, open science will certainly need to become a ubiquitous term, emerging within frank discussions within secondary through doctorate level educational settings, overlying decisions about where to submit every new manuscript, becoming the deciding factor in selecting candidates for employment and projects for grant-funding. Open science must become as appealing as classical science. To do so, it must be visible. At OSK, we've dedicated ourselves to making the widespread discussion of open science plausible.
> 
> We have a variety of projects we're working on, each of which will benefit greatly from your sage counsel and assistance. I will share more information on these projects later.
> 
> For now, thanks again for having us. Looking forward to learning from everyone. Cheers!
> 
> Andrew Ramsey
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> open-science at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-science

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