Opening Science

In this introductory chapter we establish a common understanding of what are and what drives current changes in research and science. The concepts of Science 2.0 and Open Science will be introduced. As such we provide a short introduction to the history of science and knowledge dissemination. We explain the origins of our scientific culture which evolved around publication methods. Interdependencies of current concepts will be elucidated and it will be stated that the transition towards Open Science is a complex cultural change. Reasons as to why the change is slow are discussed and the main obstacles are identified. Next, we explain the recent changes in scientific workflows and how these cause changes in the system as a whole. Furthermore, we provide an overview on the entire book and explain what can be found in each chapter.

Open Science is an umbrella term encompassing a multitude of assumptions about the future of knowledge creation and dissemination. Based on a literature review, this chapter aims at structuring the overall discourse by proposing five Open Science schools of thought: The infrastructure school (which is concerned with the technological architecture), the public school (which is concerned with the accessibility of knowledge creation), the measurement school (which is concerned with alternative impact measurement), the democratic school (which is concerned with access to knowledge) and the pragmatic school (which is concerned with collaborative research).

In this chapter, Binswanger (a critic of the current scientific process) explains how artificially staged competitions affect science and how they result in nonsense. An economist himself, Binswanger provides examples from his field and shows how impact factors and publication pressure reduce the quality of scientific publications. Some might know his work and arguments from his book ‘Sinnlose Wettbewerbe’.

As high as the potential of Web 2.0 might be, the European academia, compared to that of the US, mostly reacts hesitantly at best to these new opportunities. Interestingly enough this scepticism applies even more to science communication than to scientific practice itself. The author shows that the supposed technological challenge is actually a cultural one. Thus possible solutions do not primarily lie in the tools or in the strategies used to apply them, but in the adaptation of the systemic frameworks of knowledge-creation and dissemination as we have practised them for decades, if not centuries. Permeating an ‘Open Science Communication’ (OSC) under closed paradigms can only succeed if foremost the embedding frameworks are adapted. This will include new forms of impact measurement, recognition, and qualification, and not only obvious solutions from the archaic toolbox of enlightenment and dissemination. The author also illustrates the causes, effects, and solutions for this cultural change with empirical data.

The Open Science movement has been most successful in transforming disciplines traditionally associated with science. Social science and humanities disciplines, especially those in the United States, are less well represented. To include all domains of knowledge, the Open Science movement must bridge these ‘three cultures’ through projects that highlight multiple lines of inquiry, research methods, and publishing practices. The movement should also consider changing its moniker to Open Knowledge in order to include academic disciplines that do not self-identify as science.

Academic publishing, as a practice and as a business, is undergoing the most significant changes in its 350-year history. Electronic journals and books, both Open Access and behind digital pay walls, are increasingly replacing printed publications. In addition to formal channels of scholarly communication, a wide array of semi-formal and informal channels such as email, mailing lists, blogs, microblogs, and social networking sites (SNS) are widely used by scientists to discuss their research (Borgman 2007, p. 47; Nentwich and König 2012, p. 50). Scholarly blogs and services such as Twitter and Facebook are increasingly attracting attention as new channels of science communication (see Bonetta 2007; Kjellberg 2010; Herwig et al. 2009). Radically different conceptualizations of scholarly (micro)blogging exist, with some users regarding them as a forum to educate the public, while others see them as a possible replacement for traditional publishing. This chapter will provide examples of blogs and microblogs as tools for scientific communication for different stakeholders, as well as discuss their implications for digital scholarship.

Social network sites (SNS) have not only become a fundamental part of the Web, but also increasingly offer novel communicative and networking possibilities for academia. Following a short presentation of the typical functions of (science-specific) SNS, we firstly present the state of knowledge regarding academic usage practices, both in general purpose SNS and in science-specific SNS. Secondly, we assess potential impacts by addressing identified key issues such as privacy, the role of pseudonymity, and the specific form of informal communication in question. In particular, we focus on the issue of network effects and the challenge of multiple channels, which presents itself as a major hurdle for an effective implementation of SNS in academia. Despite these difficulties, we come to the conclusion that SNS are, in principle, functional for scholarly communication and that they have serious potential within academia.

Citations of relevant works are an integral part of all scholarly papers. Collecting, reading, and integrating these references into a manuscript is a time-consuming process, and reference managers have facilitated this process for more than 25 years. In the past 5 years, we have seen the arrival of a large number of new tools with greatly expanded functionality. Most of the newer reference managers focus on the collaborative aspects of collecting references and writing manuscripts. A number of these newer tools are web-based in order to facilitate this collaboration, and some of them are also available for mobile devices. Many reference managers now have integrated PDF viewers (sometimes with annotation tools) for scholarly papers. Reference managers increasingly have to handle other forms of scholarly content, from presentation slides to blog posts and web links. Open source software and open standards play a growing role in reference management. This chapter gives an overview of important trends in reference management and describes the most popular tools.

Free access to knowledge is a central module within the context of Science 2.0. Rapid development within the area of Open Access underlines this fact and is a pathfinder for Science 2.0, especially since the October 2003 enactment of the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities”. Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (http://oa.mpg.de/files/2010/04/berlin_declaration.pdf)

Recent years have seen a great deal of experimentation around the basic concept of the journal. This chapter overviews some of the more novel or interesting developments in this space, developments which include new business models, new editorial models, and new ways in which the traditional functions of the journal can be disaggregated into separate services.

This chapter describes how the Public Knowledge Project, a collective of academics, librarians, and technical genies, has been, since 1998, building open source software (free) publishing platforms that create an alternative path to commercial and subscription-based routes to scholarly communication. It sets out how its various website platforms, including Open Journal Systems, Open Conference Systems, and, recently, Open Monograph Press, provide a guided path through the editorial workflow of submission, review, editing, publishing and indexing. Thousands of faculty members around the world are now using the software to publish independent journals on a peer-reviewed and Open Access basis, greatly increasing the public and global contribution of research and scholarship.

Impact assessment is one of the major drivers in scholarly communication, in particular since the number of available faculty positions and grants has far exceeded the number of applications. Peer review still plays a critical role in evaluating science, but citation-based bibliometric indicators are becoming increasingly important. This chapter looks at a novel set of indicators that can complement both citation analysis and peer review. Altmetrics use indicators gathered in the real-time Social Web to provide immediate feedback about scholarly works. We describe the most important altmetrics and provide a critical assessment of their value and limitations.

While Online Publishing has replaced most traditional printed journals in less than twenty years, today’s Online Publication Formats are still closely bound to the medium of paper. Collaboration is mostly hidden from the readership, and ‘final’ versions of papers are stored in ‘publisher PDF’ files mimicking print. Meanwhile new media formats originating from the web itself bring us new modes of transparent collaboration, feedback, continued refinement, and reusability of (scholarly) works: Wikis, Blogs and Code Repositories, to name a few. This chapter characterizes the potentials of Dynamic Publication Formats and analyzes necessary prerequisites. Selected tools specific to the aims, stages, and functions of Scholarly Publishing are presented. Furthermore, this chapter points out early examples of usage and further development from the field. In doing so, Dynamic Publication Formats are described as (a) a ‘parallel universe’ based on the commodification of (scholarly) media, and (b) as a much needed complement, slowly recognized and incrementally integrated into more efficient and dynamic workflows of production, improvement, and dissemination of scholarly knowledge in general.

“To make progress in science, we need to be open and share.” This quote from Neelie Kroes (2012), vice president of the European Commission describes the growing public demand for an Open Science. Part of Open Science is, next to Open Access to peer-reviewed publications, the Open Access to research data, the basis of scholarly knowledge. The opportunities and challenges of Data Sharing are discussed widely in the scholarly sector. The cultures of Data Sharing differ within the scholarly disciplines. Well advanced are for example disciplines like biomedicine and earth sciences. Today, more and more funding agencies require a proper Research Data Management and the possibility of data re-use. Many researchers often see the potential of Data Sharing, but they act cautiously. This situation shows a clear ambivalence between the demand for Data Sharing and the current practice of Data Sharing. Starting from a baseline study on current discussions, practices and developments the article describe the challenges of Open Research Data. The authors briefly discuss the barriers and drivers to Data Sharing. Furthermore, the article analyses strategies and approaches to promote and implement Data Sharing. This comprises an analysis of the current landscape of data repositories, enhanced publications and data papers. In this context the authors also shed light on incentive mechanisms, data citation practises and the interaction between data repositories and journals. In the conclusions the authors outline requirements of a future Data Sharing culture.

This chapter outlines some of the principal ways United States Intellectual Property Law affects the sharing of digital scholarly objects, particularly for those who wish to practice reproducible computational science or Open Science. The sharing of the research manuscript, and the data and code that are associated with the manuscript, can be subject to copyright and software is also potentially subject to patenting. Both of these aspects of Intellectual Property must be confronted by researchers for each of the these digital scholarly objects: the research article; the data; and the code. Recommendations are made to maximize the downstream reuse utility of each of these objects. Finally, this chapter proposes new structures to manage Intellectual Property to accelerate scientific discovery.

The advent of the Open Science paradigm has led to new interdependencies between the funding of research and the practice of Open Science. On the one hand, traditional revenue models in Science Publishing are questioned by Open Science Methods and new revenue models in and around Open Science need to be established. This only works if researchers make large parts of their data and results available under Open Access principles. If research funding wants to have an impact within this new paradigm, it requires scientists and scientific projects to make more than just text publications available according to the Open Access principles. On the other hand, it is still to be discussed how Research Funding itself could be more open. Is it possible to generate a new understanding of financing science shaped by transparency, interaction, participation, and stakeholder governance—in other words reach the next level as Research Funding 2.0? This article focuses on both of the aspects: Firstly, how Research Funding is promoting Open Science. Secondly, how an innovative and open Research Funding might look like.

The advent of open innovation has intensified communication and interaction between scientists and corporations. Crowdsourcing added to this trend. Nowadays research questions can be raised and answered from virtually anywhere on the globe. This chapter provides an overview of the advancements in open innovation and the phenomenon of crowdsourcing as its main tool for accelerating the solution-finding process for a given (not only scientific) problem by incorporating external knowledge, and specifically by including scientists and researchers in the formerly closed but now open systems of innovation processes. We present perspectives on two routes to open innovation and crowdsourcing: either asking for help to find a solution to a scientific question or contributing not only scientific knowledge but also other ideas towards the solution-finding process. Besides explaining forms and platforms for crowdsourcing in the sciences we also point out inherent risks and provide a future outlook for this aspect of (scientific) collaboration.

Increasing visibility in the Internet is a key success factor for all stakeholders in the online world. Sky rocketing online marketing spending of companies as well as increasing personal resources in systematic “self-marketing” of private people are a consequence of this. Similar holds true for the science and knowledge creation world—here, visibility is also a key success factor and we are currently witnessing the systematic exploitation of online marketing channels by scientists and research institutes. A theoretical base for this novel interest in science marketing is herein provided by transferring concepts from the non-science online marketing world to the special situation of science marketing. The article gives hints towards most promising, practical approaches. The theoretical base is derived from considerations in the field of scale-free networks in which quality is not necessarily a predominant success factor, but the connectivity.

Licences are a topic many researchers shy away from. And it is common behavior that property rights are unknowingly signed away. In this little section we would like to present the different creative commons licences one is oftentimes confronted with. This book for instance is published under a creative commons license. They are widely used and especially popular online and it is helpful to any researcher to understand what they mean.

Scientific publications—ranging from full papers, abstracts, and presentations to posters, including grant applications and blog posts—are usually written by one or a few authors and then corrected and reviewed by many authors. Collaboration on scientific publications is a cornerstone of science. Many novel tools exist that can be integrated and facilitate this process. However, novel disadvantages come with the changes of the workflow—the future will tell as to which way to work on documents will be the most efficient one.

Two large challenges that researchers face today are discovery and evaluation. We are overwhelmed by the volume of new research works, and traditional discovery tools are no longer sufficient. We are spending considerable amounts of time optimizing the impact—and discoverability—of our research work so as to support grant applications and promotions, and the traditional measures for this are not enough.

The success of modern, evidence based and personalized medical research is highly dependent on the availability of a sufficient data basis in terms of quantity and quality. This often also implies topics like exchange and consolidation of data. In the area of conflict between data privacy, institutional structures and research interests, several technical, organizational and legal challenges emerge. Coping with these challenges is one of the main tasks of information management in medical research. Using the example of cancer research, this case study points out the marginal conditions, requirements and peculiarities of handling research data in the context of medical research.

While the previous chapters of this book reveal some technical principles of Science 2.0, here we look at the psychological and sociological motives of researchers using these novel tools. In this chapter we will see how and why the main drivers of scientists in the Internet are different from usual “offline” scientists. We consider here an Internet-geek (driven by the psychological principles described below), assuming that he/she is also a scientist (the potential audience of Science 2.0). So how would such a person behave?

This book about novel publishing and collaboration methods of scholarly knowledge was itself created using novel and collaborative authoring tools. Google Docs as a collaborative authoring and text editing tool and Dropbox as a cloud storage solution were used. Our experience was a positive one and we think that it saved us a lot of organisational emails and hundreds of work hours. Here we describe the workflow process in detail so that the interested author might benefit from what we learnt.

Science 2.0 is a concept of immense potential for the historical discipline. Throughout the world, researchers are undertaking different projects that attempt to harness the benefits of research efforts employing a wider community, be it fellow historians or the general public, and have reached different conclusions and results. Yet, most of these projects point to a clear direction in historical research of increasingly relying on the tremendous benefits that digital, and at times, Open Access to both scholarly work and primary sources has given them. While the idea of using Science 2.0 and crowd sourcing for historical research has produced a number of projects of great potential, Open Science and ideas of open publishing remain largely underutilized and avoided by the academic community of historians.

In 2005 the German National Library of Science and Technology started assigning DOI names to datasets to allow stabile linking between articles and data. In 2009 this work lead to the funding of DataCite, a global consortium of libraries and information institutions with the aim to enable scientists to use datasets as independently published records that can be shared, referenced and cited.