You’ve seen posts here about Open Access, the movement attempting to make research journal articles freely available to all. We’ve also mentioned the Open Data movement, which aims to make data freely available. But have you heard about Open Science?
Open Access and Open Data are part of Open Science. The best description of Open Science that I’ve found so far is a TED talk by Michael Nielson.
If you want more detail there’s an interesting case study report done by the Research Information Network and the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts.
New technologies have made it easy to collaborate and share. The question is how to incorporate these technologies into the process that is science while protecting quality, reliability, peer review, and some form of recognition and reward for scientists.