In Parts one and two, I talked about the scholarly practice of Open Access publishing, and about how the central concept of "openness", or knowledge as a public good, is being incorporated into other aspects of science. I suggested that the overall practice (or philosophy, or movement) might be called Open Science, by which I mean the process of discovery at the intersection of Open Access (publishing), Open Data, Open Source (software), Open Standards and Open Licensing....
Here I want to move from ideas to applications, and take a look at what kinds of Open Science are already happening and where such efforts might lead....
By way of analogy, think about what the Web has made possible, and ask yourself: how much of that could you have predicted in, say, 1991, when Sir Tim wrote the first browser? Actually, "infancy" being a generous term for the developmental state of Open Science, a better analogy probably reaches further back: how much of what the internet has made possible could anyone have predicted when ARPANET first met NSFnet? Given that last link, for instance, would you have seen Wikipedia coming? How about eBay, Amazon.com, RSS, blogs, YouTube, Google Maps, or insert-your-own-favorite amazing web site/service/application? ...
Sequence data (such as mRNA, genomic DNA and protein sequences) have long been the leading edge of large-scale collaborative science, largely because early competition among public and private organizations resulted in a series of groundbreaking agreements on public data sharing....
Donat Agosti recently pointed to three related projects: Biotext, which builds text mining tools; EBIMed, which analyses Medline search results and presents associations between gene names and several other databases; and the Arrowsmith Project, which allows semantic comparison between two search-defined sets of PubMed articles. The latter also maintains a list of free online text mining tools, which currently includes several dozen sites offering tools for a variety of purposes, although the majority are still focused on Medline and/or sequence databases. These sorts of tools are not only useful, they are likely to become essential....
Happily, there is a better [form of impact analysis than Impact Factors] just over the Open Access horizon. Once a majority of published research is available in machine-readable OA databases, the community can get out from under Thomson's thumb and improve scientific bibliometrics in a host of different ways. Shadbolt et al. list more than two dozen improvements that OA will make possible....
As the body of OA literature expands, these and similar tools will provide a far more reliable and equitable means of comparing researchers and research groups with their peers than is currently available, and will also facilitate the identification of trends and gaps in research focus. The downstream effects of increased efficiency in managing and carrying out research will be profound....
[I]t's possible to do fully Open Science, publishing day-to-day results (including all raw data) in an online lab notebook. I know it's possible because Jean-Claude Bradley is doing it; he calls it Open Notebook Science. His lab's shared notebook is the UsefulChem wiki, which is supplemented by the UsefulChem blog for project discussion and the UsefulChem Molecules blog, a database of molecules related to their work. There is nothing to prevent Jean-Claude from publishing traditional articles whenever he has the kind of "story" that is required for that format, but in the meantime all of his research output is captured and made available to the world. Importantly, this includes information which would never otherwise have been published -- negative results, inconclusive results, things which simply don't fit into the narrative of any manuscript he prepares, and so on. Being on a third-party hosted wiki, the notebook entries have time and date stamps which can establish priority if that should be necessary; version tracking provides another layer of authentication....
If I've managed to pique anyone's interest, I recommend reading Peter Suber's Open Access News and anything else that takes your fancy from the "open access/open science" section of my blogroll....
PS: Unfortunately I had to cut most of Hooker's well-chosen examples, details, and links in order to make this excerpt. See the whole article. And while you're at it, read it in the context of the first two installments:
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
