Discussing Open Science

It’s fascinating how blogs allow you to overhear conversations between people with similar interests, regardless of where they are and whether or not you know them. And then there’s the magic of following links, going from one blog to the next until you’ve forgotten how you even got to a certain place.

Following informational breadcrumbs like that, I’ve just discovered a very interesting piece by Bill Hooker asking What do we mean by Open Science? Have a look if you’re also a researcher, though Bill is thinking specifically of natural science. Also, read this short report on presenting in Second Life by Jean-Claude Bradley, Bill Hooker’s essay on Open Science and Open Data and Richerd Akerman’s post on the future of research and impact if you have the time.

Here’s a great quote from Richard:

What I keep hearing is, how can we impact factorize open science. Well, the answer is, you can’t. Let’s stop trying to find some magic algorithm whereby a machine tells us what quality science is. What’s completely mad to me about this is that we already have processes to assess science quality. Every time you review a new student, every time you look at a grant proposal, heck, even on the infamous tenure committees and research assessments, a group of humans looks at a portfolio of existing or proposed work, and decides whether it is good enough.

I guess because the ways we find and retrieve information have changed drastically, we also expect quality assessment to become automated at some point. One could argue that it already has in other contexts with things like PageRank, though of course that’s popularity being ranked, not quality (the two seem to converge to some extent when it comes to web search).

Regarding terminology (”Open Science”, “Open Research” etc): like Bill, I could care less. Linguistically the Science-Humanities-Social Sciences split doesn’t map to languages other than English anyway. In German we say Wissenschaft (which is all of the above) and add a prefix (Naturwissenschaft for (Natural) Sciences, Geisteswissenschaft for Humanities and so forth). The other thing is where to situate many new disciplines in regards to these traditional categories. If, like me, you do natural language processing, social network analysis and genre studies more or less at once, does that belong to Science, SocSci or Humanities? I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. Human language is just one phenomenon that can be studied with a variety of methods and I won’t wait for disciplinary delineations to catch up. We should call it Open Science and just broaden the semantic range of the word science a bit. Words do, on occasion, change their meanings.