Open science: why is it so hard?
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Open science: why is it so hard?
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Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#2Open is not profitable?
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#3Astronomers are incredibly dedicated to outreach. You can get data used by professional astronomers in publicly-accessible databases on the web. Here's a collection of these resources:
http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/links.html
The challenge is you have to learn a bit about the databases and visualization software to get going. Then you might need to learn some electromagnetism, relativity, and astrophysics to interpret the data. There are excellent tutorials, some many years old, that you can find.
Open science is hard because science is hard. It takes knowledge to interpret the data. It takes effort to transform the data into something that can be interpreted. And there's a lot of data.
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#4> Repeat after me: scholarship is not a publishing business.
Nope - it's much more than that. It's a way for a caste of too-often incompetent and self-absorbed university dwellers to perpetrate itself.
I've had the misfortune of working in university for a while. People on department are living in a bubble - they write books and they publish on journals that are read only by other professor "studying" the same "subject". They treat subjects like "the history of mining in scandinavia". Why? Because they're often the only person in the world (or one of the 2-3 people in the world) who is studying that. What does it mean? A grant, and later a position as a full-time professor. Everyone of them has his small little niche in which he's the best specialist in the world... that is used to both justify their research and to avoid real world competition.
Publishing rules will never change if the underlying ecosystem doesn't. If professors will ever be interested in expanding their audience (now they're interested in the opposite) then publishing will change accordingly.
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#5It's not hard, it's that most researchers just don't care. Most researchers have access to all papers they need through their universities, and if they don't, most papers are only an email away. Publishing in those journals for which you need to pay (which is only a minority) is paid for by grands or the university. How many people do you know who couldn't get their papers published only because they couldn't afford the journal charges?
The truth is that only a small (albeit vocal) minority cares about 'open science'. For most researchers, it just doesn't matter, and there is no incentive to pursue it. Actually having time to write papers worth publishing is more of an issue than those that do get published being accessible to people who, in all honesty, have no interested in them (i.e., the general public).
(it's quite interesting to note that (in my statistically undoubtedly non-representative experience) the demographic that advocates 'open access' the most is quite homogeneous - mostly PhD students with a new professor here and there. Maybe it's the cynical me, but I've been in the game long enough to see people I meet at conferences convert from being advocates for open access to not caring about it any more once they get some years of experience and realize it doesn't matter that much.)
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#6It's not hard, it's that most researchers just don't care. Most researchers have access to all papers they need through their universities, and if they don't, most papers are only an email away. Publishing in those journals for which you need to pay (which is only a minority) is paid for by grands or the university. How many people do you know who couldn't get their papers published only because they couldn't afford…
Maybe if there would be some kind of Wikipedia-style science crowdsourcing project, they would care more because they would be jealous on its success and accomplishments?
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#7It's not hard, it's that most researchers just don't care. Most researchers have access to all papers they need through their universities, and if they don't, most papers are only an email away. Publishing in those journals for which you need to pay (which is only a minority) is paid for by grands or the university. How many people do you know who couldn't get their papers published only because they couldn't afford…
Maybe if there would be some kind of Wikipedia-style science crowdsourcing project, they would care more because they would be jealous on its success and accomplishments?
Given the state of the situation, a wiki-style site for information sharing is just not going to happen. Nobody, authors first, has the interest for something like that to happen - researchers are very interested in sharing, with other researchers. The general public doesn't interest them one bit (you can show the number of citations your paper nobody read has received to have your grant renewed or to get a better position, nobody cares if you've built a website that shares your research with the general public and has 10000+ uniques a day)
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#8It's not hard, it's that most researchers just don't care. Most researchers have access to all papers they need through their universities, and if they don't, most papers are only an email away. Publishing in those journals for which you need to pay (which is only a minority) is paid for by grands or the university. How many people do you know who couldn't get their papers published only because they couldn't afford…
Maybe if there would be some kind of Wikipedia-style science crowdsourcing project, they would care more because they would be jealous on its success and accomplishments?
Whose success and accomplishments? Why would a researcher be jealous about some website getting many visitors? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#9I find it really aggravating that schools such as the ETHZ get billions in taxes a year yet refuse to publish the majority of their papers online.
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#10It's not hard, it's that most researchers just don't care. Most researchers have access to all papers they need through their universities, and if they don't, most papers are only an email away. Publishing in those journals for which you need to pay (which is only a minority) is paid for by grands or the university. How many people do you know who couldn't get their papers published only because they couldn't afford…
I think you underestimate the potential interest in open science (and by extension, open data).
The access limitations act as a barrier when it comes to the application of research. Yes, of course, a multi-billion dollar company with huge R&D departments will have all the subscriptions available, but what about the smaller companies and start ups? What about individual people?
Also, the current system rewards incestuous island thinking. There isn't a giant catalog of knowledge, and it's a shame. Imagine one library with all the world's research and data, open, categorized, expandable, for everyone to use.