Live themes (past or current)
Proposed themes
- Metrics – Metrics and research assessment (analysis or intelligence Christian Hauschke ) have been highlighted by two recent controversies: first the 'predatory publishing' scandal; and second the EU Commission ward of the European Open Science Monitor being awarded to consortium that included Elsevier as a partner. The consensus in the Open Science community is that the majority of metrics being used in research are 'not fit for purpose' and that a new set of metrics should be built in an scientific, open, accountable, and robust fashion.
- Preprint Culture - arXiv was a thing even before the web itself, and in recent years the concept spread to even more fields. Platforms like Open Science Framework, new concepts like Open Peer Review, policies encouraging "green road" self-archiving, publishers integrating preprint-like services into their platforms - there's contiously happening a lot, preprints seem to be one of the driving
- Open Peer Review (OPR) – a central plank to restoring trust, credibility, and hopefully effectiveness of research publishing. As part of the opening up of scholarly communication on top of Open Access, OPR is accompanied by the following example areas: pre-prints, open annotations, open citation databases, and the DORA agreements for improved research assessment. There are a variety of platforms and ways to carry out OPR and its merits need exploring.
- Diversity in Open Science – what role can Open Science play in establishing equality and parity in the numbers and types of roles groups who have been excluded from science, academia and research. Also is there a role for Open Science in addressing the historic imbalances in research outputs from the Global South and the new relationships being formed between Europe and BRICS nations.
- Citizen Science – a survey of Citizen Science practice and looking at where it is being picked up. An interesting set of question in Citizen Science are about how to go beyond a passive view of the public as either crowd sourcing providers or being about 'the public understanding of science'. What other types of initiatives are out there: research libraries open to all; science search results in 'normal search'; or a voice for science in the media?
- FOSS and Open Science infrastructure development – Open Source procurement policies 'the need for R&D dev cycles to be in public institutions and not in private sector' - Barcelona city gov (full open source commitment) vs EU Open Science Cloud (neutral policy) and current OA H2020 commission. The EU has made positive recommendations on FOSS but its not mandatory. EU FOSS strategy https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/informatics/open-source-software-strategy_en. Francesca Bria CTO, director Barcelona Digital City (the elected city council) https://cities-today.com/power-to-the-people/#SmartCities
- Open Science in electrical power distribution systems – electrical distribution, innovations, etc. See: #Energis13 https://twitter.com/hashtag/ENERGI3?src=hash This area is interesting as it is a positive way that engineers and other researchers can make a contribution to addressing climate change, and a number of open initiatives are being made. It is also an example of a specific field being changed by Open Science.