7 Habits of the Open Scientist
A series of posts by David Ketcheson that begins:
Science has always been based on a fundamental culture of openness. The scientific community rewards individuals for sharing their discoveries through perpetual attribution, and the community benefits by through the ability to build on discoveries made by individuals. Furthermore, scientific discoveries are not generally accepted until they have been verified or reproduced independently, which requires open communication.
Historically, openness simply meant publishing one’s methods and results in the scientific literature. This enabled scientists all over the world to learn about essential advances made by their colleagues, modulo a few barriers. One needed to have access to expensive library collections, to spend substantial time and effort searching the literature, and to wait while research conducted by other groups was refereed, published, and distributed.
Nowadays it is possible to practice a fundamentally more open kind of research — one in which we have immediate, free, indexed, universal access to scientific discoveries. The new vision of open science is painted in lucid tones in Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery. After reading Nielsen’s book, I was hungry to begin practicing open science, but not exactly sure where to start. Here are seven ways I’m aware of. Each will be the subject of a longer forthcoming post.
The seven principles are:
- Freely accessible publications.
- Reproducible research.
- Pre-publication dissemination of research.
- Open collaboration through social media.
- Live open science.
- Open expository writing.
- Open bibliographies and reviews.
What are your habits for research on topic maps or other semantic technologies?
I first saw this at: Igor Carron’s Around the blogs in 80 summer hours.