[open-science] Open Scholar Foundation

[Jenny Molloy]

Hi All

Please see the new post up on the Open Science blog from Tobias Kuhn
regarding his ideas for an Open Scholar Foundation to offer recognition for
those who practise open research:

http://science.okfn.org/2013/12/06/open-scholar-foundation/

All feedback on this mailing list or in the comments on the blog post would
be welcome, I have cc'd Tobias so you can contact him directly if you
prefer.

The post text is copied below for convenience!

Jenny


The goal of the Open Scholar
Foundation<http://www.openscholarfoundation.org/>is to improve the
efficiency of scholarly communication by providing
incentives for researchers to openly share their digital research
artifacts, including manuscripts, data, protocols, source code, and lab
notes.

The proposal of an “Open Scholar Foundation” was one of the winners of the
1K challenge of the Beyond the PDF conference:
http://www.force11.org/node/4358 This was the task of the challenge:

What would you do with 1K that would significantly advance scholarly
communication that does not involve building a new software tool?

The idea was to establish a committee that would certify researchers as
“Open Scholars” according to given criteria. This was the original proposal:

I would set up a simple "Open Scholar Foundation" with a website,
where researchers can submit proofs that they are "open scholars" by
showing that they make their papers, data, metadata, protocols, source
code, lab notes, etc. openly available. These requests are briefly
reviewed, and if approved, the applicant officially becomes an "Open
Scholar" and is entitled to show a banner "Certified Open Scholar
2013" on his/her website, presentation slides, etc. Additionally,
there could be annual competitions to elect the "Open Scholar of the
Year".

An alternative approach (perhaps more practical and promising) would be to
provide a scorecard for researchers to calculate their “Open Scholar Score”
on their own. There is an incomplete draft of such a scorecard in the
github repo here<https://github.com/tkuhn/openscholar/blob/master/docs/scorecard-draft.md>
.

In any case, his project should lead to an established and recognized
foundation that motivates scholars to openly share their data and results.
Being a certified Open Scholar should be something that increases one’s
reputation and visibility, and should give a counterweight to possible
benefits from keeping data and results secret. The criteria for Open
Scholars should become more strict over time, as the number of
“open-minded” scholars hopefully increases over the years. This should go
on until, eventually, scholarly communication has fundamentally changed and
does not require this special incentive anymore.

It is probably a good idea to use Mozilla Open
Badges<http://openbadges.org/>for these Open Scholar banners.

We are at the very beginning with this initiative. If you are interested in
joining, get in touch with us! We are open to any kind of feedback and
suggestions.
- See more at:
http://science.okfn.org/2013/12/06/open-scholar-foundation/#sthash.YioMdW8Z.dpuf
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