Open science

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Revision as of 09:09, 9 July 2014 by Jouni (talk | contribs) (Open access survey results from Taylor & Francis)
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Open science is a way of making scientific research. The idea is to immediately share everything that is not secret due to e.g. privacy issues, and in a collaborative manner develop shared understanding about the topic at hand.

Current situation and attitudes

Taylor & Francis has published an online survey on open access in 2014. They asked researchers worldwide about their views and attitudes about open access. Some of the key findings were:

  • Researchers are willing to give their their articles for further use provided that the use is non-commercial (Q5).
  • The most important property of peer review is to evaluate novelty and merit, even if it takes a lot of time. In contrast, post-publication peer review is seen important or very important by less than 25 % of respondents. It seems that speed is not important for researchers. Also, it seems that researchers want their work to be evaluated novel and worth merit by peers rather than by actual usage. (Maybe they know that there is no merit-producing system related to usage.) (Q8)
  • Vast majority of researchers (89 %) believe that journal articles will remain the main outputs of research also after ten years. (Q15)
  • A majority (63 %) believe that academic journals will remain the main publishing forum for research. However, a growing minority (21 %) believes that institutional or subject-based repositories will grow in importance and co-exist with journals. (Q18)

Overall, it seems that researchers are very conservative and see neither need for nor tendency toward a system where publishing data and publishing interpretations from data would be separated. Maybe this idea is so novel that researchers do not even recognise the possibility.

See also