Open Scholarship

When I agreed to join the Open Scholarship FLC, I’ll admit that I wasn’t quite sure where it was headed, and the primary model that I had in mind was open access. But the first set of readings led me back to the Center for Open Science which I’d only been vaguely familiar with before this point. I ran across an article from Brian Nosek et al. which argues for the importance of openness in production for the health of the scientific enterprise.

The authors recognize that they are promoting an ideal for science – the article title, after all, begins with “Scientific Utopia.” But the article relies on pragmatic observations and arguments; the authors understand how research is really performed and how systemic incentives to publish novel results ends up shaping how we design and analyze experiments. Nosek has also put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, by developing multiple projects within the COS that promote best practices in science. So while he is promoting an ideal, he is also trying to provide a way of reaching that ideal.

What particularly grabbed me is that the authors promote a vision of science that requires a community-oriented mindset, in which researchers recognize that even rival labs are working together toward a common goal. I’ve been intensely interested in the fledgling field of the “Science of Team Science,” (and also here and here) whose goal is to (scientifically) study how scientists can most effectively work together. In my own field of neurophysiology, it’s obvious that “big labs” and large-scale collaborations are becoming more and more common (and necessary). Both the Allen Brain Institute and HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, for example, explicitly organized their new institutes around the idea of team science in which many researchers intentionally work together toward a single common goal. If this makes you think of compromised, slow-moving work that requires everyone to agree on everything, you’ve got the wrong picture of team science. The extraordinarily innovative, successful Bell Labs was the initial study model for many modern efforts in team science.

What has been lacking in SoTS so far, though, is a clear map of how team practices can best be learned and taught. Knowing a goal (effective team science) is quite different from knowing how to reach that goal. This is exactly where my pedagogical research has been focused for the last few years – developing a curriculum within an undergraduate science course that helps students learn and practice crucial skills identified in SoTS. The goals that I am aiming for are described in an extraordinary report developed by the National Cancer Institute, “Collaboration and Team Science: A Field Guide”. These skills also align well with the teamwork skills that most employers want college graduates to have but that universities have struggled to deliver.

Another issue that arises in “team science” are questions of how to navigate tenure issues. That’s the topic of this week’s session, and I’ll explore it further in my next post.