open science Archives – Generation R

Illuminating Dark Knowledge

Peter Kraker on December 3, 2018

How innovation in search engines needs renewing with
open working and open indexes

Image: LA at Night, Wikimedia, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/LA_at_night.jpg

Without being able to build on top of existing — search tools and indexes — innovation in search engines is being held back and letting down researchers and the public. The Open Access and Open Science movement that have worked hard to make free hundreds of thousands of publications, but at the last mile search engines are failing to effectively deliver on discovery. Public knowledge is hidden in plain sight — a phenomenon called “Dark Knowledge”. This article is a call for open infrastructural ‘ways of working’ to be adopted as ‘the new normal’ to turn this situation around in software and interface development for scholarly search.

An Interview with de-RSE: Supporting Researchers Using Software

Gen R on November 23, 2018

Image: de-RSE https://www.de-rse.org/de/index.html

Socializing Infrastructures

de-RSE – Research Science Engineers: A New Association in Germany

An interview by GenR with members of the newly forming German association of Research Software Engineers – de-RSE. The association is being formally constituted in late November 2018 (next week 26th Nov., Berlin) and will provide a new support network for the wider software community. Highlights being a summer 2019 conference in Potsdam, and a fellowship programme. The interview is the first in a series of article in GenR’s theme ‘Socializing Infrastructures‘ and we take the opportunity to ask de-RSE for their comments on Open Science infrastructures and ‘software as infrastructure’.

Socializing Infrastructures #infraQA

Gen R on November 21, 2018

Questions about ‘how’ to transition to an Open Science future

Socializing Infrastructures

A GenR Theme

GenR has an editorial theme on questions of ‘Socializing Infrastructures’ for Open Science. The theme will run over November and December 2018, with blogposts, visualizations, and conversations.

Join us on Twitter @gen_r_ and tweet your own Open Science infrastructure questions with the hashtag #infraQA

Research or Perish! The Decentralized Web and Open Research. A Report from the FORCE11 2018 Montreal Conference

Simon Worthington on November 12, 2018

Image: FORCE11 2018 Montreal Conference, group photo

Decentralized Web

I attended the FORCE11 annual conference—an event with a very broad coverage of scholarly communications—with a mission in mind. This mission was to see what decentralized web (DWeb) research projects had matured to a level to be reusable in the working context of a scholars. Most DWeb systems and services are in an alpha phase, so in early R&D state where things are still experimental and not meant for large scale professional use. When a systems is in an alpha phase the objective is to carry out R&D to be able to test a set of assumptions and so improve a system to be able for it to move onto become a beta system, and then a full release. My very real concern is that almost all DWeb systems being proposed don’t know enough about how scholars and academia works, and instead use very thin models of scholarly workflows, that in turn means the chances of adoption, moving through the development phases, or solving the big problems in science communications are greatly reduced.

The Busiest Researchers Ever! The Decentralized Web & Ending the Culture of Misguided Metrics in Science

Karmen Condic-Jurkic on September 3, 2018

Caption: ‘International System of Units’. The SI base units: Symbol, Name, Quantity. A ampere electric current. k kelvin temperature. s second time. m metre length. kg kilogram mass. cd candela luminous intensity. mol mole amount of substance. Wikipedia.

Decentralized Web

Karmen Condic-Jurkic looks at a reboot for academic knowledge infrastructures with the decentralized web as a thought catalyst for making science in new ways: to disseminate knowledge faster and more easily; and to call for a clean start on metrics for making better research by rewarding—best practice, scientific integrity, or to steer research to be socially relevant for example with experiments in tokenomics.