Proposal: Platform for Open Science

Author(s): Spencer Wilson

Towards the development of a workflow for doing radically open science

Purpose

• Embrace a platform for uploading and sharing scientific results. This would increase the transparency of work and provide an outlet to track progress of e.g. PhD projects. As projects become larger and more collaborative, this would be helpful to track “tasks” under larger projects. It also provides a unified place to look for ongoing research. This would inevitably lead to more collaboration, within and outside the institute. Everyone would have a digital anchor for their work to ask for feedback.

Implementation

• Unclear– there exist platforms for this (Open Science Framework, possibly some through UCL) though they will all have pros and cons.  https://osf.io/
• If internal peer review and version control can be added to the framework, this becomes a pre-preprint reviewing mechanism to accelerate ongoing work.

Stakeholders

• All researchers.

Unknowns

• Which platform? How can we trial it?
• How to encourage people to participate or make its use mandatory?
• Can/should this be kept internal rather than public?
• Can this prove useful enough to generate adoption?
• Data migration? If the platform folds, or we move to a new one?