Opening Science The Evolving Guide On How The Internet Is Changing Research Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing Sönke Bartling
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Sönke Bartling & Sascha Friesike
Editors
Opening Science
The Evolving Guide on How the Internet
is Changing Research, Collaboration
and Scholarly Publishing
123
Editors
Sönke Bartling Sascha Friesike
German Cancer Research Center Alexander von Humboldt Institute
Heidelberg for Internet and Society
Germany Berlin
Germany
and
Open Access This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
All commercial rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is
concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication
of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the
Publisher’s location, in its current version, and permission for commercial use must always be obtained
from Springer. Permissions for commercial use may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright
Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of
publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for
any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein.
Initially the Internet was designed for research purposes—so was the World Wide
Web. Yet, society deviated from this intended use and as such many aspects of our
daily lives have changed drastically over the past 20 years. The Internet has
changed our ways of communicating, watching movies, interacting, shopping, and
travelling. Many tools offered by the Internet have become second nature to us.
At first, the net was designed as a plain data transfer network for researchers, yet it
has since morphed into a vivid, transforming, living network. The evolution of the
Internet came with barely foreseeable cultural changes, affecting core elements of
our society, such as collaboration, government, participation, intellectual property,
content, and information as a whole.
Novel online research tools pop up constantly and they are slowly but surely
finding their way into research culture. A culture that grew after the first scientific
revolution some 300 years ago and that has brought humanity quite far is on the
verge of its second profound metamorphosis. It is likely that the way that
researchers publish, assesses impact, communicate, and collaborate will change
more within the next 20 years than it did in the past 200 years.
This book will give researchers, scientists, decision makers, politicians, and
stakeholders an overview on the basics, the tools, and the vision behind the current
changes we see in the field of knowledge creation. It is meant as a starting point for
readers to become an active part in the future of research and to become an
informed party during the transition phase. This is pivotal, since research, as a
sensitive, complex process with many facets and millions of participants, hierar-
chies, personal networks, and structures, needs informed participants.
Many words are used to describe the future of research: ‘Science 2.0’, ‘Cyber-
science 2.0’, ‘Open Research’, ‘Open Science’, ‘Digital Humanities’, ‘eScience’,
‘Mode 2’, etc. … They may trigger feelings of buzzwordism, yet at the same time the
struggle for precise definitions highlights the current uncertainty regarding these and
shows the many possible outcomes the current changes in research might bring.
It seems contradictory in itself to publish a ‘traditional’ book on this topic—
why don’t we simply go online? The book is and will be an important medium in
research, just as papers and abstracts, and most importantly human interactions,
will continue to be. However, all will be supplemented by novel tools, and
accordingly so is this book. You can find, download, and even edit the entire book
online at www.openingscience.org. It is published under the Creative Commons
v
vi Preface
license, and everyone is invited to contribute to it and adopt and reuse its content.
The book was created using a collaborative authoring tool, which saved us many
meetings and tedious synchronizations of texts among authors. We made this book
a living example of the communication culture research can have—not only in the
future—but already today.
We thank all authors; their contributions and invested efforts are highly appre-
ciated. The authors participated in the review process of the book. Besides our
authors, many thanks go to our discussion partners and reviewers of our work, and to
those who have not (yet) contributed a particular text, who are Annalies Gartz,
Ayca-Nina Zuch, Joeseph Hennawi, Prof. Fabian Kiessling, Christine Kiefer,
Thomas Rodt, Kersten Peldschus, Daniel Schimpfoessl, Simon Curt Harlinghausen,
Prof. Wolfhard Semmler, Clemens Kaiser, Michael Grasruck, Carin Knoop, Martin
Nissen, Jan Kuntz, Alexander Johannes Edmonds, Aljona Bondarenko, Prof. Marc
Kachelrieß, Radko Krissak, Johannes Budjan, Prof. Henrik Michaely, Thomas
Henzler, Prof. Christian Fink, Prof. Stefan O. Schönberg, Tillmann Bartling, Rajiv
Gupta, and many others …
Part I Basics/Background
Part II Tools
vii
viii Contents
S. Bartling (&)
German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: soenkebartling@gmx.de
S. Bartling
Institute for Clinical Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Mannheim University
Medical Center, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany
S. Friesike
Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: friesike@hiig.de
her problem. She had never done that specific isolation before and hence did not
know how to do it. Her colleagues did not know, either. No one in my lab or even
on my floor of the Cancer Center was doing such experiments, said Forster.
She was stuck. Then Forster thought of turning to the community of ResearchGate.
ResearchGate is a social network (Boyd & Ellison 2007) for scientists to exchange
ideas, publications, and to discuss research. Forster had first signed up to
ResearchGate in 2009. She had heard about the network at a conference in Boston
and was intrigued: I thought that sharing research experience and discussing
topics that you always wanted to discuss with someone would be a great oppor-
tunity. I like that it is a professional network where you can help other people and
be helped. Since then she had answered multiple questions from fellow
ResearchGate members and now it was her turn to ask the community for help.
Within 24 h Forster had a solution. Two researchers replied to her post and sug-
gested different methods. She tried one and it worked. You don’t have to search for
the best approach via Google or go through all of these publications, Forster says.
A social network for scientists helped Forster to solve a problem that she had
bugged colleagues about for several weeks within a single day. Forster’s case is far
from uncommon. Researchers all over the world use modern communication tools
such as social networks, blogs, or Wikipedia to enhance their scientific expertise,
meet experts, and discuss ideas with people that face similar challenges. They do
not abandon classical means of scientific communication such as publications or
conferences, but rather they complement them. Today we can see that these novel
communication methods are becoming more and more established in the lives of
researchers; we argue that they may become a significant part of the future of
research. We undertook this book in order to highlight the different developments
that are currently arising in the world of knowledge creation. We do not know
whether all of these developments will prevail, yet we are certain that institutional
knowledge creation will change drastically over the next decade. Naturally, any-
one involved in research does well to inform themselves about these develop-
ments. There is no perfect way by which research will be carried out in the future.
Every researcher has to decide for themselves which technologies and methods
they will include in their work. This, however,—as anything in research—starts
with informing oneself about what is already out there; it is our goal to provide that
information with this book.
In an early draft-version of this book, the present section was called ‘A Brief
History of Science’. Yet, we ran into several problems with this heading. Firstly,
there is a singularity in the English language that differentiates between knowledge
creation that is concerned with the rules of the natural world (science) and
knowledge creation that is concerned with the human condition (humanities).
Throughout the preparation of this book we constantly ran into this dilemma and
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 5
we would like to take the opportunity to tell you that whenever we talk about
science we mean any organized form of knowledge creation (see chapter Open
Science and the Three Cultures: Expanding Open Science to all Domains of
Knowledge Creation). Secondly, science is often understood as the product created
by a scientists. And a scientists is understood as someone with a full-time job at a
university or a research institute. Yet, new forms of collaboration reach far beyond
our institutional understanding of doing research, which brings us to certain
dissent.
As such we labeled the section ‘Knowledge Creation and Dissemination’.
Knowledge creation and its dissemination are two sides of the same coin—
knowledge does not impact on society if it is unable to disseminate (Merton 1993).
Throughout history we can see that breakthroughs in knowledge creation went
hand in hand with breakthroughs in its dissemination. In turn, dissemination is not
only bound to technological changes but also societal changes such as freedom of
speech or the Renaissance. In large, the present book is a compendium that pre-
sents current changes that we see in knowledge creation and dissemination.
Actually, many chapters of this book challenge our traditional understanding of
how scientific knowledge should be disseminated. Moreover, as of today,
researchers’ views on how knowledge creation is changing differ drastically in
many aspects. And it is likely that our understanding differs from your under-
standing. As such, all we want to offer in this book is a comprehensive overview
on what is changing in the world of knowledge creation, which foundations are
being laid today, and what might become essential in the future.
The history of human knowledge is closely linked to the history of civiliza-
tion—one could even argue that the history of civilization is in large parts based on
knowledge creation and its dissemination. In prehistoric times, knowledge was
passed from one generation to the next one orally or by showing certain tech-
niques. This mainly applied to basic everyday tasks such as hunting, fire making,
manufacturing clothes, or gathering nutritious foods. The creation of this knowl-
edge was not yet structured and it was not recorded, except for occasional
drawings like cave paintings. The drastic change in knowledge creation was the
invention of a writing system. Roughly at the same time, agriculture came to life.
These two inventions combined laid the groundwork for what we today consider
civilization. Civilization allowed for the division of labor and hence individuals
began to specialize—knowledge creation accelerated. The researcher as a pro-
fession concerned with the creation of knowledge made his debut in ancient
Greece. Scientists like Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Socrates, or Archimedes wrote
their observations down, taught others, and created knowledge that is still relevant
roughly 2,500 years later. Disciplines as we know them today formed many
centuries later and as such ancient scientists were usually philosophers, mathe-
maticians, and physicists in one. Similar developments were noticeable in other
societies as well. In China for instance thinkers like Confucius, Laozi, or Sun Tzu
were concerned with question similar to those raised in ancient Greece.
During the following centuries, religion played a major role in the development
of knowledge creation. Beliefs about certain essential questions such as how was
6 S. Bartling and S. Friesike
the earth created? where do diseases come from? or what happens after death?
impeded scientific advances in many fields and as such slowed down overall
knowledge creation. Not very surprisingly, the middle Ages are often considered
to be a dark age, in which rational thinking was prohibited. With the invention of
the printing press and the beginning of the Renaissance in the 17th century,
research slowly emancipated itself from religion. Slowly meaning that it took the
church until 1992 to rehabilitate Galileo for his outrageous claim that the sun
might be the center of our universe.
During the Renaissance, considerable amounts of knowledge were created by a
few polymaths—more or less a small group of outstanding thinkers involved in all
kinds of questions ranging from biology, to art, to engineering—hence the label
‘Renaissance man’. Da Vinci, for instance, developed machines related to today’s
helicopters, analyzed water, clouds, and rain, painted some of the most important
paintings of mankind, and did considerable research on anatomy. Goethe wrote,
did research in botany, and was in dispute with Newton over questions concerning
optics and color.
What we consider modern science came to life in the 17th century when
knowledge creation was both, professionalized and institutionalized. The number
of scientists started to skyrocket—from a few polymath during the renaissance to
over a million scientists in 1850. This growth did not slow down over the fol-
lowing 150 years and today we can globally count roughly 100 million people
involved in science. More and more disciplines formed and scientists became
professional specialists in tiny fields rather than experts in general knowledge.
1
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath151/kmath151.htm
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 7
downright preposterous, as we all agree upon the notion that research is always
based upon other research and as such that research results should be available to
those interested in them.
It was the development of a journal publication system that drastically changed
publishing in research and gave appropriate credits to researchers. The first journal
purely dedicated to science was Philosophical Transactions which has been
published ever since [e.g. one of the first scientific articles (Hook 1665)]. Pub-
lishing scientific journal articles became a pivotal building block of modern sci-
ence. Researchers developed a common understanding that it is in the common
interest for research results to be openly available to all other researchers (David
2004). This understanding of the necessity for openness in science … led to the
modern journal system, a system that is perhaps the most open system for the
transmission of knowledge that could be built with seventeenth-century media
(Nielsen 2011). Based on this core concept of publishing, myriads of partially
institutionalized, partially commercialized structures grew. These structures
developed constitute the cultural, political, and fundamental background in which
academic knowledge creation works till today. The entire system is inherently
based upon journals printed on paper. Almost every scientific publication we see
today is created as if it is meant to be printed. Articles come in very predefined
forms and are usually downloaded as printout-like PDFs. There is no fundamental
reason to stick to this principle—other than our scientific heritage.
Currently, we can see a transition in knowledge dissemination set off by the
Internet that enables scientists to publish in forms unimaginable only a few years
ago. In all kinds of disciplines these new methods pop up, be it in the humanities
under the term ‘digital humanities’, from a Web 2.0 angle under the term ‘Science
2.0’, or from those fighting for free knowledge under the term ‘open research’ and
‘Open Science’. The Internet offers new answers to many challenges which the
first scientific revolution overcame hundreds of years ago. And it is the task of
today’s researchers to assess and evaluate those newly created options, to bridge
the legacy gap, and to lay a path towards the second scientific revolution.
The journal system developed at a time when written or printed letters and a few
books were the only means of transferring knowledge. Before printing and dis-
seminating a piece of knowledge, it had to be in a complete and correct form,
otherwise it was not worth paying for the costly publication process (Fig. 1).
Publishers derived control over scientific content by controlling the printing and
dissemination of scientific results. Accordingly, the assessment of scientific impact
developed around the journal system.
However, paper is no longer the only media of choice. Publishing costs
diminished and from a technical viewpoint preliminary results or idea snippets
8 S. Bartling and S. Friesike
Fig. 1 The first scientific revolution happened when the publishing of scientific papers became
the prevailing means of disseminating scientific knowledge. Our scientific culture developed
around this. Today the Internet provides novel means of publishing and we are in the ‘legacy gap’
between the availability of these tools and their profound integration into the scientific culture
(second scientific revolution)
could be published, edited, and commented on. Yet, research as a whole is affected
by the culture it has developed; it is affected by a the journal system created when
results simply had to be printed on paper. We are currently in a ‘‘legacy gap’’
(Fig. 1) and everything points to the fact that we are on the brink of a new
scientific revolution. Yet, how this revolution actually will be played out remains
one of the most interesting questions in modern science.
Picture a situation in which scientists would be able to publish all their thoughts,
results, conclusions, data, and such as they occur, openly and widely available to
everybody. The Internet already provides tools that could make this possible
(microblogs, blogs, wikis, etc.). Moreover, picture a scientific culture in which
researchers could be in the situation of doing so with the assurance that they will
be credited appropriately. Imagine the potential for interactions between
researchers. Knowledge could flow quickly, regardless of institutions and personal
networks. Research results could be published as they occur. There would be no
need to wait until results are complete enough to support a full paper. Similarly, if
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 9
Fig. 2 Today, research projects are conducted until results justify a full-blown paper. In the future,
scientists might openly share ideas, preliminary results, and negative results at much earlier stages
of their research using the novel publication methods that became available with the Internet
Terms like Science 2.0, Open Science, Digital Humanities, eScience, Mode2, or
Open Research are all umbrella terms that formed over the past few years and that
emphasize various aspects of the second scientific revolution.
10 S. Bartling and S. Friesike
Fig. 3 The research culture of the future possibly supports an open and wide communication
beyond institutes and personal networks by providing novel, credited means of disseminating
knowledge between researchers. Negative as well as positive findings will contribute to other
research projects much sooner after the findings occur
All of these umbrella terms struggle to find a clear definition and people often
use them interchangeably when talking about current changes in scientific pursuits.
We sought after defining each and every one of these terms in order to establish a
coherent picture of how the change in knowledge creation is seen from different
angles. Yet, what each of the terms means and how exactly it differs from the
others is often unclear. If you ask five people how Mode 2 and Science 2.0 are
associated you can be certain to get five different and possibly contradictory
answers. All terms are somewhat born of the necessity that a term for the present
changes was needed. Knowledge creation is a wide field and thus several terms
emerged, whereof we would like to define only two—mainly in order to use them
in the discussions contained within this book.
• Science 2.0 refers to all scientific culture, incl. scientific communication, which
employs features enabled by Web 2.0 and the Internet (in contrast to Science 1.0
which represents a scientific culture that does not take advantage of the
Internet).
• Open Science refers to a scientific culture that is characterized by its openness.
Scientists share results almost immediately and with a very wide audience.
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 11
Fig. 4 Since the first scientific revolution, science and knowledge creation was open—as open as
the methods of the seventeenth century allowed it to be. The Internet has brought about novel
methods, thus allowing science to be more open
Strictly speaking, since the first scientific revolution, science has been open
(Fig. 4). Through the Internet and Web 2.0 science can become ‘more Open
Science’, meaning that researchers share results, ideas, and data much earlier
and much more extensively to the public than they do at the moment.
Science 2.0 enables Open Science, but Science 2.0 does not necessarily have to
happen in an Open Science fashion, since scientists can still employ features of the
Internet, but stay very much put in terms of publishing their results. This might be
due to cultural and legal restrictions.
Many stakeholders serve the current scientific culture. They brought research, and
with it society, quite far. Yet now, we have to face the challenges that come with
all the novel developments and with the second scientific revolution. History
shows that knowledge creation has always adopted new opportunities. In turn, it
certainly will do so this time, too. Yet the question remains as to who will be the
drivers and the stakeholders of tomorrow. In the best case, the biggest benefactor
will be the scientific knowledge generating process—and with it research itself.
Many researchers show considerable concern in respect to the novel concepts of
the second scientific revolution. From these concerns vivid discussions should
arise and useful conclusions should be found that steer the second scientific rev-
olution in the right direction. This is especially true since significant input should
come from within the active research community itself.
12 S. Bartling and S. Friesike
Another question is whether future openness and onlineness will set optimal
incentives for the creation of knowledge. Many wrong paths could be picked and
may result in dead-ends. It is important that stakeholders are flexible and honest
enough to be able to leave dead-end streets.
Some voices discuss the current transition of research as a revolutionizing
process that might overcome current shortcomings in scientific conduct. Short-
comings are among many others: questionable proof generating means (such as
wrongly applied statistics (Ioannidis 2005; Sterne 2001), intolerance against
uncommon theses and approaches, citation-based ‘truth generation’, and inflexible
cultures of scientific approaches within disciplines. Furthermore, publication-bias
through rejection of negative results or rejection of non-confirming studies (Turner
et al. 2008; Begley & Ellis 2012) and questionable incentives that are set by the
current methods to assess scientific quality (see chapter Excellence by Nonsense:
The Competition for Publications in Modern Science) are also factors. The tran-
sition towards the second scientific revolution can help to solve these problems,
but it does not necessarily have to. It can be a way to make science more open,
liberal, and fair, but it can also result in the opposite.
To conclude, much will depend upon whether researchers become the leading
force within this transition, or whether they play a passive role driven by other
stakeholders of the research process. In order to prevent the latter, researchers
should be deeply involved in this process and they should be aware of the potential
consequences. This book is meant to support scientists in becoming a constructing
factor in the designing process of the second scientific revolution.
Despite their separation, the key aspects of the second scientific revolution are
interconnected (Fig. 5). Open Access (see chapter Open Access: A State of the Art),
for instance, needs new forms of copyright concepts (see Creative Commons
Licences). Reference managers (see Reference Management) are a great addition to
social networks for scientists (see chapter Academia Goes Facebook? The Potential
of Social Network Sites in the Scholarly Realm). Assessing the scientific impact of
novel publications such as blog posts (see (Micro)Blogging Science? Notes on
Potentials and Constraints of New Forms of Scholarly Communication) needs novel
impact measurement factors—altmetrics (see chapter Altmetrics and Other Novel
Measures for Scientific Impact), which might be based on unambiguous researcher
IDs (see chapter Unique Identifiers for Researchers). Altmetrics, at the same time,
can be integrated into social networks. There is no single most important factor: it is
more a multitude of facets that jointly change how research works.
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 13
Fig. 5 It is important to understand that many tools of the second scientific revolution will only
make sense if others are also implemented. For example, alternative impact measurement systems
such as altmetrics only make sense if researchers can be uniquely identified—either with a
Unique Researcher ID or within a social network
This book brings together the enabling concepts that shape the current discussion
on our changing research environment. We divided the book into three parts in
order to make its content easily accessible.
• The first part of the book is called Basics; here we cover topics that highlight the
overall shift in scientific thinking. It begins with the chapter ‘‘Open Science:
One Term, Five Schools of Thought’’ in which Benedikt Fecher and editor
Sascha Friesike explain the many meanings which have been given to the term
Open Science. This is followed by Mathias Binswanger’s ‘‘Excellence by
Nonsense: The Competition for Publications in Modern Science’’ in which he
highlights some of the downsides in today publication driven scientific envi-
ronments. Alexander Gerber’s article titled ‘‘Science Caught Flat-footed: How
Academia Struggles with Open Science Communication’’ follows; here the
author explains why social media are adopted quite slowly by the research
community, especially in Europe. The last article in the section was written by
Michelle Sidler and is entitled ‘‘Open Science and the Three Cultures:
14 S. Bartling and S. Friesike
Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
References
Begley, C. G., & Ellis, L. M. (2012). Drug development: raise standards for preclinical cancer
research. Nature, 483(7391), 531–533. doi:10.1038/483531a.
Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship.
J. Comput.-Mediated Commun., 13(1), 210–230. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x.
David, P. A. (2004). Understanding the emergence of ‘‘Open Science’’ institutions: functionalist
economics in historical context. Ind. Corporate Change, 13(4), 571–589. doi:10.1093/icc/
dth023.
Towards Another Scientific Revolution 15
Hook, M. (1665). Some observations lately made at London concerning the planet Jupiter.
Philosophical transactions of the royal society of London, 1(1–22), pp. 245–247. doi:10.1098/
rstl.1665.0103.
Ioannidis, J.P.A. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine, 2(8),
p. e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124.
Merton, R.K. (1993). On the shoulders of giants: a Shandean postscript Post-Italianate ed.,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nielsen, M. (2011). Reinventing discovery: the new era of networked science. New Jersey:
Princeton University Press.
Sterne, J. A. C. (2001). Sifting the evidence—what’s wrong with significance tests? Another
comment on the role of statistical methods. BMJ, 322(7280), 226–231. doi:10.1136/
bmj.322.7280.226.
Turner, E. H., Matthews, A. M., Linardatos, E., & Tell, R. A. (2008). Selective publication of
antidepressant trials and its influence on apparent efficacy. New England J. Med., 358(3),
252–260. doi:10.1056/NEJMsa065779.
Open Science: One Term, Five Schools
of Thought
There is scarcely a scientist who has not stumbled upon the term ‘Open Science’ of
late and there is hardly a scientific conference where the word and its meaning are
not discussed in some form or other. ‘Open Science’ is one of the buzzwords of the
scientific community. Moreover, it is accompanied by a vivid discourse that
apparently encompasses any kind of change in relation to the future of scientific
knowledge creation and dissemination; a discourse whose lowest common
denominator is perhaps that science in the near future somehow needs to open up
more. In fact, the very same term evokes quite different understandings and opens
a multitude of battlefields, ranging from the democratic right to access publicly
funded knowledge (e.g. Open Access to publications) or the demand for a better
bridging of the divide between research and society (e.g. citizen science) to the
development of freely available tools for collaboration (e.g. social media platforms
B. Fecher
German Institute for Economic Research, Mohrenstraße 58, Berlin 10117, Germany
S. Friesike (&)
Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: friesike@hiig.de
for scientists). From this vantage point, openness could refer to pretty much
anything: The process of knowledge creation, its result, the researching individual
him- or herself, or the relationship between research and the rest of society.
The diversity, and perhaps ambiguity, of the discourse is, however, under-
standable considering the diversity of stakeholders that are directly affected by a
changing scientific environment. These are in the first place: Researchers from all
fields, policy makers, platform programmers and operators, publishers, and the
interested public. It appears that each peer group discussing the term has a different
understanding of the meaning and application of Open Science. As such the whole
discourse can come across as somewhat confusing. By structuring the Open Sci-
ence discourse on the basis of existing literature, we would like to offer an
overview of the multiple directions of development of this still young discourse, its
main arguments, and common catchphrases. Furthermore, we intend to indicate
issues that in our eyes still require closer attention.
Looking at the relevant literature on Open Science, one can in fact recognize
iterative motives and patterns of argumentation that, in our opinion, form more or
less distinct streams. Referring to the diversity of these streams, we allowed
ourselves to call them schools of thought. After dutifully combing through the
literature on Open Science, we identified five distinct schools of thought. We do
not claim a consistently clear-cut distinction between these schools (in fact some
share certain ontological principles). We do, however, believe that our compilation
can give a comprehensible overview of the predominant thought patterns in the
current Open Science discourse and point towards new directions in research
regarding Open Science. In terms of a literature review, we furthermore hope that
this chapter identifies some of the leading scholars and thinkers within the five
schools.
The following table (Table 1) comprises the five identified schools together
with their central assumptions, the involved stakeholder groups, their aims, and the
tools and methods used to achieve and promote these aims.
It must be noted that our review is not solely built upon traditional scholarly
publications but, due to the nature of the topic, also includes scientific blogs and
newspaper articles. It is our aim in this chapter to present a concise picture of the
ongoing discussion rather than a complete list of peer-reviewed articles on the
topic. In the following, we will describe the five schools in more detail and provide
references to relevant literature for each.
Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought 19
To view the issue as a formerly hidden research process becoming transparent and
accessible to the common man seems a decidedly romantic image of doing science.
20
(continued)
Table 2 (continued)
22