Suchergebnisse

» See video of presentation (54 min.) Open Science is not new, it was the bedrock on which the scientific revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries were built. Its open publication of scientific concepts and the evidence (the data) on which they were based allowed scrutiny of the logic of an argument and replication of observations or experiments or their refutation. It has been the basis of so-called "scientific self-correction". But the technological revolution of recent decades has produced an unprecedented explosion in the human capacity to acquire, store and manipulate data and information and to instantaneously communicate them globally, irrespective of location. It has produced fundamental changes in human, social and economic behaviour and has implications for research and learning that are far more profound and pervasive than those that followed Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, including the way that science engages with the wider community. But the explosion of data is also undermining self-correction through the difficulty of making large volumes of supporting data concurrently available in a scrutinisable form, risking both the method of science and its credibility. This poses a major challenge for modern science to stimulate open release and sharing of data in ways that also facilitate new modes of collaboration and that increase creativity through interaction of many brains and many communities unbounded by institutional walls. We need to challenge and re-define many of the habits and norms of researchers and their institutions if the research community if it is to exploit technological opportunities, maintain self-correction and maximize the contribution of research to human understanding and welfare. Fortunately the response to these imperatives is growing, through the enunciation of principles for open science, the development of procedures and tools and the engagement of researchers, universities, funders, publishers, learned societies and governments.

This report and policy brief were commissioned by the African Science Granting Councils' Initiative (SCGI) as a motivating contribution for the theme of the Science Granting Council's 2019 Annual Forum in Tanzania: Open Science in Research and Innovation for Development. The report explores the impact of the digital revolution; describes the array of essential tools and processes required for the new paradigm of open science; and highlights the magnitude of the task of building a strong open science capacity on the contemporary framework of African science and its open science activities. Having identified the crucial enablers of open science that need to be put in place and inhibitors that need to be minimised or removed, the report the presents a series of recommendations. The strength of the Science Granting Councils lies in their intermediary position between governments and the science community, influencing and being influenced by both. Acting as a collective, they could achieve efficiencies of scale, stimulate virtual critical masses, intra- African collaboration and enhanced impact. They should consider the timely creation of an African open science area. They should explore the potential for convergence of relevant national policies, for radical changes in the modes of scientific communication and the use of science evaluation metrics. They should explore means of federating IT systems. They should engage with stakeholders in plotting a way forward, including governments, policymakers and science academies; researchers and their institutions, particularly the universities; and international supporters in seeking greater strategic convergence between their respective priorities.

This document is a manifesto and call to action produced by the DRUM (Digital Representation of Units of Measure) Task Group as part of its efforts to mobilise representatives from International Scientific Unions and Associations to engage with this fundamentally important issue. Why are Units Important? The major challenges that confront human societies are global in reach and complex in nature. They do not have simple, single-discipline, solutions. The intrinsically interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary challenges require trans-sectoral cooperation between academic, commercial and governmental agencies. For such collaboration to succeed, the essential tools for scientific exchange of information must be fit for purpose if they are to meet the challenges. Quality data is essential, and to be understandable and usable, the data must meet internationally-agreed community-endorsed conventions or standards, a key element being the clear representation of units. Although the "collaboration imperative" is recognised by the major research funders and international organisations, they often fail to appreciate all the details that are essential to enable the required cooperation. Funding to encourage collaboration, highlighting relevance, pathways to impact, and facilitating international exchanges, are all vital but these are a tower of cards if the foundations for scientific exchange of information are not up to the required challenge. Providing quality data is essential, but collaborative work will fail unless all those who need to use the data (and the associated information and knowledge) can actually understand it and this requires international, community agreements. Units of measure are a key part of such agreements. Much of the global output of data lacks clear and unambiguous definitions of the units used. While the units of measure of quantitative values might be conventional and thus unstated for the original application, they are often obscure outside the originating community or discipline. This is ...

Looking at Open Science and Open Data from a broad perspective. This is the idea behind "Scientific data sharing: an interdisciplinary workshop", an initiative designed to foster dialogue between scholars from different scientific domains which was organized by the Istituto Italiano di Antropologia in Anagni, Italy, 2-4 September 2013.We here report summaries of the presentations and discussions at the meeting. They deal with four sets of issues: (i) setting a common framework, a general discussion of open data principles, values and opportunities; (ii) insights into scientific practices, a view of the way in which the open data movement is developing in a variety of scientific domains (biology, psychology, epidemiology and archaeology); (iii) a case study of human genomics, which was a trail-blazer in data sharing, and which encapsulates the tension that can occur between large-scale data sharing and one of the boundaries of openness, the protection of individual data; (iv) open science and the public, based on a round table discussion about the public communication of science and the societal implications of open science. There were three proposals for the planning of further interdisciplinary initiatives on open science. Firstly, there is a need to integrate top-down initiatives by governments, institutions and journals with bottom-up approaches from the scientific community. Secondly, more should be done to popularize the societal benefits of open science, not only in providing the evidence needed by citizens to draw their own conclusions on scientific issues that are of concern to them, but also explaining the direct benefits of data sharing in areas such as the control of infectious disease. Finally, introducing arguments from social sciences and humanities in the educational dissemination of open data may help students become more profoundly engaged with Open Science and look at science from a broader perspective.