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The says that a big barrier to adopting 'open source science' is the prestige that comes with publishing in heavy weight, closed journals. It then draws the comparison to software, and why open source software is quite successful: > Addressing this issue, Toni references the open spirit amongst coders working on open-source software. “There’s no reward system right now for open science. Scientists’ careers don’t benefit from it. But in software, everyone wants to see your GitHub account.” This got me thinking. First, I think a large reason a lot of people (read: people in my bubble, mostly students / recent CS grads) use GitHub is precisely because of the prestige. I'd say the people who use GitHub without ever contributing to an open repo vastly outnumbers the people who do contribute. Instead, many people start using GitHub as a way to show-off their own projects -- the whole "GitHub as my resume" idea. But as more people do so, having a GitHub becomes a standard, and you get a positive feedback loop. Second, how could we shift the status quo for science to associating prestige in an open system? I'm not familiar with the history of open source software, but I wonder if there are any parallels from how OSS grew that we could apply to science publishing. Finally, there's a big systemic difference between doing collaborative science and writing open source software I can think of:
the barrier to entry to software is much lower. A lot of hobbyist programmers contribute to open source projects (or at least have a GitHub account, which feeds more attention / prestige to the ecosystem), whereas it's pretty hard to contribute to science without both a graduate education and (in many fields) expensive equipment. |
If you're sufficiently motivated to consider actual engagement, you might like to think about lending support to the excellent work being done by the Open Knowledge Foundation (http://okfn.org)
"The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a non-profit organisation founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open data and open content in all their forms – including government data, publicly funded research and public domain cultural content."
There's plenty of opportunity to get in there and make a significant contribution, e.g. http://openbiblio.net/ just to pick an example at random.