A gentle introduction to Open Science

Presentation at the Open Science course at Hjerkinn 2024

Erlend B. Nilsen

Introduction

Open science is just science done the way science should be done….

OR

In the future there will be science and closed science

(i.e. -> what we today call open science will in the future just be science….)

Pillars of Open Science, UNESCO (2021)

Living Norway Ecological Data Network

Living Norway Ecological Data Network facilitates open, reproducible and transparent sharing, use and reuse of ecological data to the benefit of society and science

Living Norway Ecological Data Network

Open Science is an umbrella term

But why bother?

What is Open Science

  • We arranged a two-day seminar about open science in research and teaching in 2020

  • The summary of the workshop can be found in the link below

Transforming science education to meet the needs of today’s students and tomorrow’s science

Is it all good - or are there remaining challenges?

The six principles of open science

  • Open methodology

  • Open source

  • Open data

  • Open access

  • Open peer review

  • Open educational resources

Different schools of open science

  • The infrastructure school

  • The measurement school

  • The public school

  • The democratic school

  • The pragmatic school

See Fecher and Friesike (2014)

image: Flaticon.com

image: Flaticon.com

Topics for discussion

  • What do YOU associate with Open Science?

  • How do you think Open Science can improve your project?

The reproduciblity crisis

1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility | Nature

Access to data

Question

What do you think is the situation for student thesis?

Could this be a concern?

  • When we publish scientific papers it is expected that data is shared (archived) publicly (so that other researchers can reuse the data)

  • However, currently we often find that this is not happening

    • See e.g. Archmiller et al. (2020)

…

See Mandeville et al. (2021) for details

Access to code

Question

What do you think is the situation for student thesis?

Could this be a concern?

  • When we publish scientific papers - we are expected to share (archive) R-code (or other code we are using to produce the reported results).

  • Again - there is room for improvement!

    • See e.g. Culina et al. (2020)

FAIR!

See Wilkinson (2016)

Questionable Reserach Practices

See Fraser (2018) for details and further discussion!

The preregistration revolution!

See Nosek et al. (2018)

Distinguish between exploratory and confirmatory science

See Nilsen, Bowler, and Linnell (2020)

Open science is just as much about….

References

Archmiller, Althea A., Andrew D. Johnson, Jane Nolan, Margaret Edwards, Lisa H. Elliott, Jake M. Ferguson, Fabiola Iannarilli, et al. 2020. “Computational Reproducibility in the Wildlife Society’s Flagship Journals.” The Journal of Wildlife Management 84 (5): 1012–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.21855.
Culina, Antica, Ilona van den Berg, Simon Evans, and Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar. 2020. “Low Availability of Code in Ecology: A Call for Urgent Action.” PLOS Biology 18 (7): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000763.
Fecher, Benedikt, and Sascha Friesike. 2014. “Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought.” In Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet Is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing, edited by Sönke Bartling and Sascha Friesike, 17–47. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_2.
Fraser, Tim AND Nakagawa, Hannah AND Parker. 2018. “Questionable Research Practices in Ecology and Evolution.” PLOS ONE 13 (7): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200303.
Mandeville, Caitlin P, Wouter Koch, Erlend B Nilsen, and Anders G Finstad. 2021. “Open Data Practices among Users of Primary Biodiversity Data.” BioScience 71 (11): 1128–47. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab072.
Nilsen, Erlend B., Diana E. Bowler, and John D. C. Linnell. 2020. “Exploratory and Confirmatory Research in the Open Science Era.” Journal of Applied Ecology 57 (4): 842–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13571.
Nosek, B. A., C. R. Ebersol, A. C. DeHaven, and D. T. Mello. 2018. “The Preregistration Revolution.” PNAS 115 (11): 2600–2606. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1708274114.
Wilkinson, et al. 2016. “The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship.” Scientific Data 3. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab072.