[open-science] Open Scholar Foundation

[Carl Boettiger]

Hi Tobias,

I think the overall concept is a neat idea.  Personally, I would prefer the
self-assessment over assessment by committee for both practical and
ideological reasons.   I think it does more good in terms of shifting
social paradigms to have people self-identify as an open scholar without
being particularly open then it does to have rather open scholars not
identified as open by some committee.

Also, I don't like the concept of a "score" on several levels:

  (a) the number would be meaningless. You cannot add ranks across
different dimensions (papers vs lab notes).  A highly multidimensional
vector space does not deserve to be reduced to a single scalar quantity.
 Yes this happens all the time and we should not encourage it.  I'd be far
happier to identify scholars leading best practices in metadata standards
and those leading best practices in software sharing as separate concepts.
 (This is not a dig at altmetrics, only at combining any metrics that have
different units into a single number).
  (b) I don't like the competitive element.  I share my own lab notebook in
order to do better science, not in order to be "more open" than the next
guy.


Cheers,

Carl


On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 4:48 AM, Jenny Molloy <jenny.molloy at okfn.org> wrote:

> 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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>


-- 
Carl Boettiger
UC Santa Cruz
http://carlboettiger.info/
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