Questions for the Open Science Panel.

The EGI Technical Forum will be happening this week in Lisbon. We will be present at the CHAIN-REDS workshop , talking about the Sci-GaIA project , but also at the Open Science Commons track , making a case for such a e-Infrastructure Commons in South Africa , perhaps in the form of NICIS. The organsiers of the Open Science Commons track will be putting together a panel, which will be asked to discuss

• Open Science Commons
  • Having heard different types of visions concerning infrastructures for open science:
    • e-Infrastructure commons (initiated by e-IRG)
    • open science commons (initiated by EGI)
    • European Research Open Science Cloud (initiated by EC)how do they relate to each other ? (e.g. does one includes the other? are there partial overlapping/commonalities? are they different level of abstractions?)
  • How we can organise future discussions to bring those visions together and evolve the discussion? e.g. a working group organising workshops co-located within the different existing community events: e.g. RDA, EGI, GEANT, PRACE, EUDAT, e-IRG, Helix Nebula Initiative, Digital ERA Forum, OpenAIRE, etc
• European Open Science Cloud (EC DSM)
  • About the European Open Science Cloud proposed in the Communications of “A Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe”, how do you see the relationship with existing national and European e-Infrastructures?
  • What are the possible funding mechanisms that could allow to build resource capacity for both large scale research infrastructures and long tail researchers?

Reward and Recognition

These are all very good and important things to discuss, however, from my point of view they seem a little top-down . An Open Science Commons is a pretty radical departure from the way in which research is conducted at the moment ¹ , which will have to challenge many implicit assumptions, including the biggest one (in my opinion):

Why ?

So, I would like to include reward mechanisms into the discussion. How will the Open Science Commons recognise contributions to the Commons, either intellectual, monetary, or in-kind ? How can we make these recognitions public and portable, ie how can I

1. verify someone’s contributions and
2. use my contributions towards my CV or reputation.

Mozilla was doing some work on this regarding their “open badges” project, which I was hoping would have been able to talk about, but there are certainly other ways too. If we are to make a true commons, there should be a tangible reward and recognition process , which is not granted to the contributors in some top-down way, but rather via community consensus , similar to the way reddit, stackexchange or other communties do things ² .

The reason we would like to focus on this is that in our experience, the equation has been unbalanced between providers and consumers. Providers of resources - whether that is manpower, intellect or hardware, often need to justify this, and in the past there has been no direct link between these contributions and the consumers thereof. Consumers on the other hand will take the most advantageous route to obtaining what they need, so cannot be constrained, except by artificial means, which they inevitably resent. Having recognitions that are agnostic of projects or infrastructures will allow contributors, particularly of intellectual resources (ie, code and knowledge), to move between initiatives - it may end up being truly and open science commons.

By explicitly stating how reward and recognition will work, we may be able to convince the vast majority of researchers that this is an investment worth making for them. An Open Science Commons should have infrastructure in place to allocate, recognise and validate this, whether that be badges or anything else.

References and Footnotes

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