research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Inge Ignatia de Waard -
Number of replies: 11

Just a title that will hopefully stimulate discussion :-)

If you link the open source community to the Web and social media tools, you cannot help but wonder whether research should follow this open<=>closed discussion, or at least be open because a part of the research community is willing to. At this stage some of the scientists do choose the open science approach.

Throughout history you had different moments in which research was either exchanged and openly debated between specialists (the golden age of Andalusia for example, where scientists, artists and clergy from all religions could come together and use the tolerance of the Moors (I know recently there were some critical bylines, but still it was exceptional) that where ruling Spain during that era to build on each others wisdom) or suppressed or only limited to the proverbial ivory tower. In contemporary history there was a tendency to keep scientific projects (while they were explored) mainly behind company or university walls, but something is changing or at least slightly rocking the walls of restricted science.

Just an example: the open science blog openwetware .

What is your idea? Would you go all the way and share your research findings from the start? Or why would not you?
In reply to Inge Ignatia de Waard

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Cameron Neylon -
I'm not sure that even I would go so far as to say that 'research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage' smile

However I would say that by making more of the results open then we can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of what we do. Moreover, related to this forum, unless you make things open then the useful aspects of social networks (network effects, friends of friends, new collaborations) can't happen.

There is a very interesting question as to when things should or shouldn't be open. There is not much argument about someone's personal medical records for instance but what about anonymised clinical records? The use of drugs more generally and records of side effects? If someone is supported by the government to do research who owns the results of their research? Who should own the results of their research?

Our experience of actually making things open is almost uniformly positive. This doesn't mean there aren't negative aspects or risks. We beleive the benefits can outweigh the risks but its an experiment in progress.
In reply to Cameron Neylon

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Inge Ignatia de Waard -

Hi Cameron

I am very happy that you with your experience in open science have joined.

Could you be a bit more specific in the 'almost uniformly positive' side of opening up your research? What benefits did you get out of it? And on which basis did you select your team that first started the open science project?

Thank you for the medical examples. They immediately give a clear idea of possible restrictions and possible discussions. Indeed personal details that can affect people’s lives should be well protected in my opinion.

In reply to Inge Ignatia de Waard

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Cameron Neylon -
What we've seen so far is small benefits, mainly arising from the ability to connect with people as new collaboraters, as Jean-Claude has said below. He simply started his Open Notebook project and found that collaborators came to him spontaneously. In my case I have put out specific requests to an existing community for help in small things that were better tackled by someone with different expertise.

The main point is that we don't select the team in advance. By making the process completely open we allow anyone to come in and assist. Many people raise the concern that this means you end up spending a lot of time dealing with vandalism or simply people who would like to help but don't have the expertise but we haven't experienced this at all. Vandalism seems to be prevented if you require people to make contributions under their own 'real' name. This is the experience at OpenWetWare, a bioscience based wiki.

Our belief is that to get the most out of network effects enabled by social media approaches the most effective route is to be completely open. By being partially open you close off access to potential contributors. Of course, we are not working on things with ethical or confidentiality issues.
In reply to Cameron Neylon

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Inge Ignatia de Waard -
I am going to keep the idea of not selecting a team in advance in my mind, I wonder if this approach also works within a company/institution if you are looking to promote social media for the first time.

I like the intention to be completely open. The only experience that comes a bit close with this idea, is with a Telemedicine forum that is open to all but requires a (free) registration. Although this is a limitation, we had to build it in so patients would not start to use certain medication on their own behalf. Telemedicine is a website for medical doctors and health care workers that work on HIV/AIDS related ART in low resource settings. They can all put cases in that they do not know how to treat and then peers and designated specialists (we had to start with specialists to make sure the exchange was based on medical good practices, but we soon learned that everyone learned a lot specialists included and peers became specialists for certain regions). This openness allowed all of them to continually get updated on the latest information through one another. So although this website was a bit restricted, the open exchange of ideas within it delivered an enourmous surplus (networking, new strategies, more knowledge from the field...)
In reply to Inge Ignatia de Waard

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Janet Salmons -

I agree that research should be open, but I don't necessarily want to share "at all stages." I don't know that giving public access to raw data is helpful. Some ways I've experimented with opening up research--

I've explored questions I was thinking about researching in online discussions/communities and conferences.

I've shared my findings through free, open to the public webinars, often with handouts that included models and resources. I posted a list of archived events and handouts on my website (http://www.vision2lead.com/html/webinars.html) so people can view them.

Of course there are risks to giving your work away. (And, not to put too fine a point on it, as an independent researcher I have to somehow earn the money to keep the computer on....) So far the response has been positive and I have no information suggesting that anyone has plagiarized my work, and now that I am published more expanded materials in book form, I hope that people who have participated in these discussions or webinars will be interested in the books and perhaps use them as texts or references.

Janet

In reply to Janet Salmons

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Inge Ignatia de Waard -
In the same way (but less organized I have planned organizing my resources, presentations for this summer) as Janet, I have been posting my own learning trajectory as well as presentations I have made, things I tried (mostly the successful ones, now trying to gather the failures to post as well) ... At this point I do not have any extra's that would generate an income, which - in dire straight days does make me wonder - but for me it is a principle to share knowledge. Somewhere along the line I belief that only interested and willing people will pick it up (for the most part).

This sharing is done by using social media: my blog in the first place, streaming and sharing my live presentations through ustream.tv (still need to work on improving my 'techy travel bag'), sharing my slides through slideshare and dabbling with other media to see if those shares add up to useful things.

All the time I wonder if this openness will be a good thing in the long run. I did see some of my presentation slides pop-up elsewhere, but mostly they did honor my Creative Commons license, so I did get mentioned. In some cases the people contacted me directly to ask if they could use some of the content.

Do any of you use a creative commons license or a similar license to be able to give some pointers on how you would like people to use your content?
In reply to Inge Ignatia de Waard

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Jean-Claude Bradley -
Concerning the use of a Creative Commons license, that is one reason we use Wikispaces as a lab notebook - all free accounts are automatically registered with a CC attribution/share-alike license. It also carries the HTML code required for Google to index it with the appropriate license. Scroll to the bottom of any page on this site to see:
http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/
In reply to Inge Ignatia de Waard

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Jean-Claude Bradley -
I have to agree with Cameron (as usual :)

Those who are very active in the Open Science community tend to not want to impose their preferences on others. There are many reasons why some research should remain closed. Privacy issues is certainly one concern and another is intellectual property. Companies who rely on patents probably should not expose all of their work in real time.

Even within the community of Open Science no two individuals see things exactly the same way. That's good because we can learn a lot more from each other that way.

In my group, we practice Open Notebook Science, which aims to be close to what you describe as "always open to the public at every stage. So far things are progressing positively for the most part.

The most important benefit I think has been finding collaborators and friends that I would not have encountered otherwise. From our server hits I also know that people have used information on our site that would otherwise not have been published. There is a lot of useful information in so-called "failed experiments".

For more info I recently gave a talk at the American Chemical Society.

In reply to Jean-Claude Bradley

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Inge Ignatia de Waard -
The "failed experiments" idea is something I am working on now as well. I used to go ahead and write down what I thought was of importance (only thinking about the positive outcomes). I did some 'failure feedback' in the beginning, but apparently did not find it that important to continue. At a given moment I noticed that colleagues were struggling because I did not give them feedback on my own failures. At this moment we are trying to gather all the things we launched ourselves in and why it did not work out (for us).

I wonder if there is such a wiki as 'some social media did work for me because...' it would be worthwhile to follow this and see what can be useful.

Your remark on finding collaborators and friends interests me. As my network grows, I start to see a character pattern that I did not anticipate. Apparently I link to people that have specific personalities (which might to some extend) be similar to RL friends.

Could you pinpoint a contra that you would still like to tackle with opennotebook science? (I saw progressing positively for the most part)
In reply to Inge Ignatia de Waard

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Jean-Claude Bradley -
What do you mean by:
Could you pinpoint a contra that you would still like to tackle with opennotebook science? (I saw progressing positively for the most part)
In reply to Jean-Claude Bradley

Re: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!

by Inge Ignatia de Waard -
ah :-) my eye fell on four tiny words in this sentence: "In my group, we practice Open Notebook Science, which aims to be close to what you describe as "always open to the public at every stage. So far things are progressing positively for the most part."

So the most part intrigued me and I was wondering what it meant.